Tag Archives: Hybrid

October 13, 2015 · 8:57 AM

A Series of Firsts: How X1 Sets the Standard for the New Enterprise Search Market

by Barry Murphy

The new world of IT demands that enterprise software support varying infrastructures – traditional managed data centers, the cloud, hybrid and virtual environments.  As a result, old-school approaches that once seemed logical no longer work in today’s reality.  For example, tightly-coupled search appliances that marry hardware and software together no longer meet the requirements of enterprises that need to make distributed workers more productive no matter what kind of device they are on.  It’s a new world for enterprise search and traditional solutions will have a very hard time adapting and scaling.

X1 is ready for the IT reality of always-on, virtual, cloud, and hybrid environments and business mobility.  This is evidenced by two “firsts” that X1 is proud to announce.  First, X1 is the first search application with an app publicly available in an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) app store.  X1 Search Mobile is available in the AirWatch marketplace.  Given the rapid move to mobile devices for work, this is no small news.  Google just announced on Friday that searching the web is now predominantly done from mobile phones.

Click to enlarge image

Click to enlarge image

It’s clear, then, that enterprise search from the mobile device is now an essential requirement for business professionals.  The mobile search app is important, but what X1 is building out is much more than that.  In order to effectively deliver enterprise search from the mobile device requires having the back-end infrastructure to support full enterprise search in virtual environments.  It also requires supporting the next-generation desktop (VDI or DaaS) where the users live. X1 has uniquely mastered such back-end infrastructure with the only desktop search (VDI or otherwise) and enterprise search solution that are VMware Ready certified.

The second “first” that X1 is proud of is the listing of X1 Rapid Discovery in the Amazon AWS Marketplace.  Again, this is no small feat – this is the first enterprise-grade search and eDiscovery application to be available in the AWS Marketplace.

AWS marketplace

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Organizations storing content in AWS can now get full-featured enterprise search and eDiscovery deployed right next to their content.  And, if these organizations store other content locally, they can deploy Rapid Discovery in their own data center as well and have a single-pane-of-glass across all information no matter where it lives.

X1 will continue to provide solutions that work in the infrastructures that organizations utilize today.  The traditional approach to search will not work, but with X1, companies will have the flexibility to deploy into any environment and give users a powerful search experience on any device.  That is a powerful productivity tool – and businesses require worker productivity the same way humans require oxygen.  It is a new enterprise search market out there and X1 is uniquely positioned to lead the charge.

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April 22, 2014 · 9:26 AM

Cloud Search Is Important, But Only A Piece Of The Enterprise Search Puzzle

by Barry Murphy

In an earlier post, I described the importance of having the ability to quickly search for information stored in the Cloud.  The post pointed out that Cloud search is somewhat more complicated than one might think at first glance because the speed of search is affected by how close the index lives to the actual data in the Cloud infrastructure.  One comment I received was that Cloud search can be fast and simple if the Cloud vendor promises a certain service level for query times and results.  That can address part of the issue around search (although IaaS providers – what we are truly talking about when we say “Cloud” – are typically not interested in guaranteeing SLAs for things like search because they allow customers to provision their infrastructure set to enable fast search with products like X1 Rapid Discovery).  Even if a Cloud vendor were to guarantee phenomenal search SLAs, the issue of unified enterprise search of all information still remains.

The reality is that enterprises and government agencies store information in “hybrid” environments that encompass on-premise systems within corporate data centers, virtualized systems that companies operate, and Cloud-based repositories.  Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of mainstream enterprises will have a hybrid cloud.  And, research from NetApp shows that organizations will be managing data across multiple cloud environments, not just a single provider, per se.

Click image to enlarge

Click image to enlarge

These are exciting developments.  As organizations embrace more modern infrastructures, there are many benefits to be had.  What we need to remember, however, is that business professionals still need to quickly find and take action on their information assets to do their jobs.  As that information gets further scattered, enterprise search will take on increased importance.  Workers don’t care if their data is stored on-premise or in the Cloud as long as they can quickly find it in an easy-to-use interface.

The challenge for today’s organizations is that information now lives in multiple infrastructures – on-premise, virtual, Cloud, or most frequently, a hybrid of all of these.  Current approaches to including Cloud-based data in enterprise search and eDiscovery require downloading a copy of the data to search so that it resides alongside other local content.  Unfortunately, that defeats the purpose of storing the data in the Cloud in the first place.

This takes me back to my original point:  Cloud search is very important.  But, Cloud search cannot simply exist in a vacuum.  An effective enterprise search solution will combine on-premise search capabilities that can talk to search in the Cloud – without requiring downloading the cloud-based information in order to search across all data.

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