It take some resources to run all the 9 search engines for this site. Each search servers run as a separate virtual machines, hosted on one of two IBM X3550 (4 Core Xeon cpu, 12 gb ram ) servers. Each hosts has 2 hard disks configured in raid 1 (both hard disks has an exact copy of all data).

Yesterday one of the hard disks failed. That is not a problem since there is a copy of the data on the other hard disk, and I had two spare disk in case something like this should happen. The hard disk is hot swappable so I replaced it with a new one and the raid started to rebuild automatically.

Then the new one failed It got replaced again, but apparently the stress of rebuilding the raid cause both the new and the old hard disk with the data to fail!

Now I can’t rebuild the raid, and can’t copy back from backup because there is no spare disks left to put into the server.

As this wasn’t enough tomorrow and Monday are national holiday, so it is proving hard to get spare parts.

Everything is backed up, but need to get the server back up before I can restore anything. As it looks now, this will not be fixed before Tuesday the 21.

More info about end dates are available at Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search page.

Microsoft will of course continue to provide the Fast Search for SharePoint search engine, but it is sad that they do not want to provide an enterprise search product that is not tied to SharePoint. Customers will have to look to other vendors.

Link: http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/searchdaimon.html

Now that Google has killed of the Google Mini there cloud based site search has probably become more relevant. It appears to work great in its niche, but most advanced functions are missing.

View review: http://www.opentestsearch.com/search-engines/google-site-search-review/ .

You can as always compare it side by side with the other engines at http://www.opentestsearch.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=enron .

That’s more than what I want to pay on something that is just a hobby project.

More info available from there price page: http://www.searchblox.com/pricing

Now the only offer from Google will be either the full Google Search Appliances that starts at approximately 30 000 $ or using the very basic, cloud hosted, Google Site Search ( from $100 to $2 000 pr year depending of number of queries).

It’s currently unknown what this will mean for the other Google Search Appliances box’es. Will there be a cheaper Google Search Appliances to fill some of the gap left by the death of the mini, or are Google considering abandoning physical search box’es all together.

Open Test Search will continue to hold our Mini up and running for the foreseeable future.

Se her for more info: http://www.enterprisesearcheurope.com/2012/Programme.aspx#session_5474

Check it out: http://www.opentestsearch.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=enron

CloudSearch was able to index 48,737 (99.8%) documents in the collection. The rest of the documents was rejected because they, according to Amazon, contains illegal Unicode characters. The end user interface you see has been created by me in Perl.

The instance type has automatically been scaled up to a “search.m1.large” search instance, and cost 345,60$ per month (0,48$ per hour x 24 hrs per day x 30 days).

This is real beta test, so expect some bugs. I know of several…

Any and all feedback is much welcome. Contact me directly on runarb [at] gmail [dot] com, or use the comment function on this post.