Enterprise Quality of Service

This is a pivotal requirement for enterprise search systems that must run continuously, and in any scenario where it is critical to minimize downtime. Enterprise quality of service includes flexible and fault-tolerant deployment and performance and scalability capabilities.

FAST ESP provides fault tolerance by deploying multiple rows of search and indexer nodes, with each row holding an identical copy of the data. In case of a node failure, the fault-tolerance protocol ensures that the recovered node does not accept any new queries before synchronizing its index with another node within the same columns. Fault tolerance protocols may be customized with respect to the query stream and the document input.

FAST ESP provides high performance and is infinitely linearly scalable in three dimensions: volume of data, queries per second and freshness of data. FAST ESP has been designed to permit parallelized spidering, indexing and query processing.

To further improve the performance of high-capacity installations, it is possible to deploy indexing and search on separate machines to handle a high query rate. In a well-designed enterprise search system using FAST ESP, the three dimensions of document volume, queries per second (QPS) and indexing speed and latency are able to scale linearly, independently and simultaneously. The desired performance targets may be achieved along each of the three dimensions in a cost-efficient architecture.

Source: FAST ESP Brochure 2007