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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.'"

39 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Fear and Opportunity by dreamchaser · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's a clear sign that MS still has a (probably growing) fear of *nix, especially Linux.

    It's also an opportunity for some enterprising company or group to fill the void. All it will do is cost MS some sales. I doubt many organizations will migrate to Windows Server just for FAST.

    1. Re:Fear and Opportunity by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You'd be surprised... This is how MS got in to start with.
      Years ago, windows machines were only used for lowend desktops (hence why its called windows - named after its gui) but they gradually got pushed out to servers because users built up a familiarity with it.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  2. cool by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    1. Re:cool by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, but how much does it hurt the world to be squeezed out through someone's fingers...

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    2. Re:cool by TDyl · · Score: 2, Funny

      About as much as having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large tarnished gold win server 2k3 box.

      --
      Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
  3. Uh, yeah... by dwiget001 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "...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...."

    Translation:

    "We are canning Linux and UNIX support to solidify Microsoft lock-in."

    1. Re:Uh, yeah... by ircmaxell · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Well, yeah, but then they say this:

      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.

      I'm REALLY confused now. So they are dropping *NIX support, to futher their goal of interoperability? WTF? Can someone explain how these 2 are NOT related?

      Either that, or the subtext of "reaffirming (their) commitment" by dropping non-win os support sheds some insight on their "commitment" in the first place...

      --
      If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
    2. 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.
    3. Re:Uh, yeah... by ocularsinister · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Two words: "Java" and "Qt"*. Writing a cross platform tool kit is hard. Fortunately, someone has already done that. Several times, in fact. If you are trying to write cross platform code and you are not writing a tool kit, then you are probably using the wrong tool for the job.

      * Yes, I know there are others...

    4. Re:Uh, yeah... by Third+Position · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      That's certainly considerate of them, isn't it? /sarc

      --
      American Third Position
      Finally, a real choice!
    5. Re:Uh, yeah... by Imagix · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, routinely. And it's not that hard to do while you're not attempting to twiddle with either OS internals, or direct hardware. And even for those, there's likely an interop layer that exists, or could be written, to smooth over even those differences. It _does_ require some discipline when coding though.

    6. Re:Uh, yeah... by Froboz23 · · Score: 2, Informative

      To better understand Microsoft's commitment to supporting non-Windows products, a more exhaustive analysis of the word "commit" is required. Here's what Merriam-Webster has to say about the definition of commit:

      transitive verb 1 a : to put into charge or trust : entrust b : to place in a prison or mental institution c : to consign or record for preservation <commit it to memory> d : to put into a place for disposal or safekeeping e : to refer (as a legislative bill) to a committee for consideration and report

      It appears they're focusing on definitions "b" and "d."

      --
      Take off every Sig. For great justice.
  4. But. by leuk_he · · Score: 4, Funny

    Your lack of faith is disturbing.
     
    .... gorrrgling sound of Justniz grabbing to this throat.....

    1. Re:But. by Robert+Zenz · · Score: 2, Funny

      Enough of this! Leuk, release him!

  5. It's a company after all... by Robert+Zenz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "...and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future."
    Reads:
    "We'll try to force everyone to use Windows in the future."

    Well...who expected something different anyway?

  6. Monoculture, yes monoculture! by jollyreaper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All hail the IT monoculture! Praise and glory to the brand!

    --
    Kwisatz Haderach
    Sell the spice to CHOAM
    This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    1. Re:Monoculture, yes monoculture! by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You know what's funny? How German and English words look and sound the same but have entirely different meanings. "Gift" means poison in German. "Mist" is dung. And "brand" is burning (the fire kind as well as the technical grinding wear kind). It could also mean mildew. And necrosis.

      I find it funny how often English words unintentionally have a far truer meaning when used as their German homonyms.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  7. Oh no!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh no!! How will the Linux and Unix communities cope?!?
    Who gives a shit?!?!

  8. 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 ultranova · · Score: 4, Funny

      Lucene has the same abilities as FAST and is a lot more efficient

      That's clearly nonsense. Which of these programs is named after the very concept of high velocity?

      BTW: What does FAST do, anyway?

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    2. 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
    3. 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."
    4. Re:Thats why theres lucene by JAlexoi · · Score: 2, Informative

      There is this little thing, called Apache Solr.

    5. Re:Thats why theres lucene by Talsan · · Score: 3, Informative

      "FAST on Linux is fucking awesome" I'll have to share that with the rest of the support team.

      Speaking purely as an individual, I wish Microsoft wouldn't have gone this way, although obviously it doesn't surprise me. On the bright side - for your organization at least - you've got another 8 years where we'll be supporting ESP 5.3, so you have a few years before you have to worry about finding another solution, or deciding that maybe running a few Windows servers wouldn't be too bad. Just saying. :)

  9. And nothing was lost by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 3, Insightful

    FAST died on the vine a long time ago. It was a dot-com that just missed the tail of the dot-com mania. So they sold their hype to Microsoft and then disappeared off the face of the planet until this week. Track down the marketeers that stired up the FAST mud again.

    --
    Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
    1. Re:And nothing was lost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      I can't speak for the commercial side of FAST ESP, but I've worked with it in the public sector where it's used in some big projects for the NHS here in the UK (but running on Windows platforms as the government is in bed with MS and the NHS is so intertwined with the company now there's little other choice). I didn't develop for it directly, just some interface stuff, but the general consensus was that it's needlessly overcomplicated in order to sell consultancy services, and needlessly wasteful of resources in order to sell hardware.

    2. Re:And nothing was lost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You have no idea what you are talking about. Gardner has consistently rated FAST as either the #1 or #2 search engine technology. And under the hood, FAST was very open-source friendly -- most of the building blocks to make it came from open source projects. It was a VERY Linux friendly product. But when they sold out to Microsoft the writing was on the wall.

  10. What kind of music do we like? by ratboy666 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Both kinds.

    Country AND Western.

    --
    Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
  11. It is a tiny market. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Informative

    The total *revenue* last year in enterprise search is just 1.1 billion dollars, according to Gartner, according to the article. It is going to touch 2 billion may be in 2013, again according the article. Considering that Microsoft gets 6.5 billion dollars *profit* per quarter, this is chump change. Further, Google is synonymous with search. It sells the Google Server in a Box, that does mail, calender, shared docs all behind the firewall of the client, unreachable by either the pings from the internet, or by subpoena. If this market segment grows, it is going to be growing the way Google wants it.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:It is a tiny market. by liquiddark · · Score: 2, Informative

      Nobody's buying Google products in the enterprise search sector. Endeca, FAST, Lucene, yes. Google? Not likely, unless you count Google Desktop Search. Google doesn't even pitch enterprise search right now. They're focused on a much less fickle set of markets. If you've never experienced a pitch by an enterprise search vendor, you don't know what you're talking about. These guys do things that appear to literally be magical in nature, organizing millions of highly custom data points into a coherent data set and slapping a slick UI over top in a matter of weeks.

  12. Re:"more innovation per release" by Robert+Zenz · · Score: 4, Informative

    It must be metric, the imperial innovations are called "Software Patents".

  13. Re:WTF is FAST? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It isn't an acronym, it is a product name.

    FAST Search. Microsoft bought them last year. Microsoft tried to get their Enterprise Search to work and failed multiple times and finally gave up and bought FAST since FAST kept taking their business.

  14. Invention of Lock-in by Statecraftsman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hi I'm Steve. I work for Microsoft and I'm going to ask you to keep buying Microsoft products. There's not much new here, we've decided make this software run only on Microsoft products so that should help you decide. If you don't use FAST, this probably won't affect you but we're looking for more ways to get you to use only Microsoft. Thanks!

  15. Fast Search And Transfer (FAST) by andersh · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually the full name of the company is Fast Search And Transfer (FAST).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Search_%26_Transfer

  16. Re:I'll continue using Linux by Robert+Zenz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You mean like a real Multi-User-Environment which UNIX copied 40 years ago from Microsoft? Or the headless-server-mode which 'invented' Microsoft in 2008? Or the Desktop-Effects/Widgets which Gnome/KDE copied 2002? Or the OpenDocument-Format which was just a former copy of OOXML? Or Firefox which was just a cheap copy of Internet Explorer 7?

  17. 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
  18. Whoah... by c · · Score: 3, Insightful

    amazing how nobody saw that one coming...

    Seriously, folks, is this really news? I'd imagine that when Microsoft does a takeover these days, one of the criteria they're using is "are we going to have a repeat of the Hotmail clusterfuck?" They were planning on doing this before they bought the company, and the only question was when and what excuse they'd be using...

    c.

    --
    Log in or piss off.
  19. Remind me... why is MONO a good thing by Rob+Y. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is exactly why nobody should ever get sucked into Microsoft 'interoperability' ploys. They are not about interoperability. They are always about extending the MS monopoly into areas that they could not reach without paying lip service to interoperability.

    --
    Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
  20. 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.