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Microsoft Phasing Out FAST Search For Linux, Unix

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-away dept.

viralMeme writes "Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release. According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, 'We’ve continued to sell, support, and update the Linux and UNIX versions of FAST ESP, and we’ve designed the next wave of FAST products (scheduled for release in the first half of calendar year 2010) to include a cross-platform search core that has been extended to take advantage of web services and support mixed-platform deployment models. With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products. As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX. Many of our customers run FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX today, and we recognize that our future focus on Windows means change. To ease the transition, we’re investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future.'"

8 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. cool by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The more they tighten their grip, the more the world will slip through their fingers.

  2. Thats why theres lucene by cridanb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lucene has the same abilities as FAST and is a lot more efficient , its used by most of the ediscovery vendors and its free in it base format yes you will have to do some work on the interface and other support areas but its the solution to MS ditching Linux support for search

    --
    men will do for beer ,that which they would not for love or money
    1. Re:Thats why theres lucene by Runaway1956 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Heh. I'm wondering why anyone is concerned about it myself.

      Welcome FAST Customers

      On April, 25, 2008, Microsoft completed its acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer, opening a new chapter in enterprise search. By combining the innovation and agility of FAST with the discipline and resources of Microsoft, our customers get the best of both worlds: market-leading products from a trusted technology partner.

      http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/en/us/fast-customer.aspx

      So - they acquired something less than two years ago, now they decide they don't like it, can't support it, and many of us never knew about it to start with. To my knowledge, I've never made use of it. Unless it was used on the net by some god-awful behind-the-scenes server.

      For the most part, Google has satisfied all my search requirements for years now. Do they use FAST? Didn't think so, LOL

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    2. Re:Thats why theres lucene by FrozenFOXX · · Score: 5, Interesting

      We use FAST at our organization. Verity (or rather the company that owned Verity search) was trying to pull a fast one on us with licensing so we had to drop them for our document indexing and we received FAST as a donation from MS as they, and many other companies, donate quite a few things to us.

      We went with FAST as opposed to a Google Search Appliance because at the time the Google box couldn't do one thing we needed desperately without some serious hacking and ill-advisement from Google (I'll give it to Google, they were straight up with us that it was a bad idea at the time with their software. Kudos to them for honesty, makes me want to buy their stuff in the future). We have documents, several thousand, that come in nightly by HTML that need to be indexed complete with search term highlighting by 7am the next morning. The system has approximately three hours to do this job. If it cannot, an essential resource in our business (which shall remain nameless but suffice it to say "lives are at stake") suffers. Google's indexing at the time was somewhat lazy in that it would index things as fast as it could but could not guarantee that 21 hours of intake would be ready to search perfectly 3 hours later. FAST could. Simple as that.

      It deeply saddens me that they're dropping the Linux platform as that's how ours was built and even the engineers that came out to build it loved working on it (RHEL for those interested). It's not unexpected, and we'll find another indexer in a few years just like we always have to due to bullcrap like this but I was hoping that once, just freakin once, MS could actually use someone else's work to their advantage WITHOUT slapping their customers. Seriously, is Not Invented Here such a big freakin deal?

      But hey, whatever, we all knew it would happen anyway. For what it's worth FAST on Linux is fucking awesome from our experience (and we've got nearly a million non-trivial documents and workload it has to contend with).

      --
      "Just a fox, a whisper."
  3. Re:Uh, yeah... by WinterSolstice · · Score: 2, Interesting

    True. If they care, they buy Google's enterprise search instead.

    I actually had to look up what these guys do (did), since I've never heard of them. Got these Google appliances all over, though.

    --
    An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
  4. Re:WTF is FAST? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Embrace, extend, and what, exactly? Oh yeah - EXTINGUISH FAST!! Tell me it isn't so - wasn't Microsoft turning over a new leaf, or something? Phhht.

    --
    "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  5. Re:Uh, yeah... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Have you written code that runs on more than one platform?

    Yes I do it professionally.

    It's a real headache, and the headache goes up exponentially as the number of systems do. By focusing on one platform, they have the ability to use their resources to innovate and not just port.

    LOL, in effect what you are saying is that Microsoft, the worlds largest and wealthiest software development company, is unable to handle cross platform code development. The open source community (and even many big companies like Oracle, IBM, etc) have been designing and building huge cross platform code bases for decades now, but Microsoft with all their comp.sci. phd's and billions of dollars, can't handle it? What a joke.

  6. We swiched from FAST ESP to Apache Solr by verdante · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been runing FAST ESP 5 clusters on RHEL for since 2008, used for web and site search. I found FAST ESP 5.2 especially to be terribly buggy on large deployments, and some issues their support never did resolve.

    Moving to a unit that just needed to search a db, we ran ESP 5.3 for a year, but have now switched completely to Apache Solr. For searching records from a database, Solr does everything we need without gouging the company for $$$$$$ in annual support fees.

    In just a few weeks we were able to set up a Solr cluster, integrate it using SolrNet, and tune Solr to produce excellent relevant results with very flexible matching. Relevance is excellent because we could tune Solr's ranking algorithm - FAST ESP was always a black box. Over about a week we tuned the parameters, and Solr now delivers better results than FAST ESP did on our data.