Russ Houberg's SharePoint Blog

So…

I've been holding off on this post for a few days now because I couldn't determine if this information was "in the wild" yet.  But it turns out that it's been reported on by at least one other blog post, so if this was protected info, I'm not the guy who released it!

That said… here's the deal.  Microsoft is doing a Wal-Mart rollback on ESP (FAST Search) for SharePoint!  If you have an EA with Microsoft that includes MOSS, then you can "add on" ESP for SharePoint for $25K per server.  The MOSS CALs cover the client access to said server.  So why is that cool?  Let us count the ways:

1. Unlike MOSS Search, FAST Search is scalable far beyond the 50 million item recommended limit for a SharePoint index server.  In fact, depending on the configuration, MSFAST can handle 50 – 75 million indexed items PER SERVER.
2. Note the PER SERVER.  With FAST, we can scale OUT instead of just UP.  Need to crawl more items…  No problem, just bolt on another FAST server.  Need to crawl items faster.  No problem, just bold on another FAST server.
3. Anybody want to guess how big a SharePoint farm scale now that MSFAST is doing the crawling?  Well, I can see architectures of 1/2 BILLION documents OR MAYBE MORE being possible with binary externalization being an additional enabler.
4. It just got WAY cheaper.  FAST used to be sold based on the features needed in the solution and it was well into the 6 and sometimes 7 figure range for cost.  Heh.  Nope.  Now it's sold PER SERVER for $25K as long as it's used to to index a SharePoint farm.
5. It's available TODAY!  While there is a licensing path to FAST for O14, you don't have to wait!  If you're index server is suffering and you've got an MS EA… what are you waiting for?

This is a game changer folks.  I'm currently architecting what could potentially be the largest SharePoint implementation in the world and FAST is a cornerstone technology for this solution.  We're talking 100s of millions of documents.  30 terabytes of metadata and binary content.

After I grind through SharePoint Master training in a few weeks here, I'll soon be heading off to MSFAST training.  So KnowledgeLake will soon be well position in the SharePoint enterprise architecture space.  That's right.  KnowledgeLake is more than just leaders in the ECM industry.  We have assembled a tiger team of seasoned SharePoint consultants as well.  Sort of like that Midas car commercial… If your looking for anything related to SharePoint deployment… "we do that".

The competition should be scared.  there are no more bullets in the gun. They shot across the bow with "MOSS Search has scalability limitations" and "you can't store blobs in a SQL database".  Both issues have now been address by either MIcrosoft server stack or 3rd party products (externalization).  And very soon, even externalization will be core stack.

So stay tuned as KnowledgeLake works to prove that the boundaries of what SharePoint can do for the enterprise have indeed been redefined!  As we push into a new level of scalable solutions, I'll publish experiences here on this blog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 9:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.