14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced the launch of its latest Google Search Appliance, its solution for enterprise search customers. The sixth version of the device is built to keep up with the ever increasing demands of even the largest businesses and is meant to be able to handle even billions of documents.
The GSA is basically a server based on a standard Dell hardware running Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors. Google spiced it up a little with a custom paint job and design, which led some to compare it to a huge piece of Swiss cheese. Regardless, it's probably the cutest-looking server you're likely to encounter. The most interesting part though is what it does. The GSA allows businesses large and small to index their internal documents and databases and then enable employees to search through those documents using an interface similar to Google's own search engine.
The new GSA 6.0 will be able to index 30 million documents up from 10 million in the last version. A big focus of the GSA was scalability. For this purpose multiple devices can be linked up even in several separate locations allowing them to handle the ever increasing volume of data and searches. The GSA is used by some very large organizations including NASA.
"The Google Search Appliance deployment is ramping up across the NASA systems," said David Valliere, program manager, eTouch, search integrator for NASA. "The Google Search Appliance 6.0's new dynamic scalability feature is instrumental to helping search internally, and the customization options mean that search results match employee security authorization levels. NASA has multiple centers and complex intranets, the Google Search Appliance 6.0 can search each autonomously, while still giving unified results that are easy for employees to navigate quickly and help them be more productive – critical when there are rockets to launch and space missions to plan."