Open source searching it all
One of my favorite stories from the Iran-Contra scandal 20 years ago was how Oliver North thought he was deleting documents by hitting "delete."
He wasn't, of course. He was just getting rid of pointers.
Flash forward 20 years, and open source can now find needles in much larger haystacks. Kazeon and Google are teaming up to offer an $80,000 solution that will let enterprises search 20 terabyte stores of unstructured files at once, including archives and backups. The complete press release came out today on the Kazeon Web site.
Vice president Troy Toman touts this as an essential tool for enterprises in our litigious society. He sees thousands of potential customers. "With the increasing nunmber of regulations on compliance, and the increasing litigious nature of business, people have a need to know where their data is."
This does not mean the NSA's attempt to grab everyone's data makes sense. The Kazeon solution only works if you know what needle you're looking for in a haystack.
"Those technologies are still only really effective in well-defined domains and small databases. It will be a while yet before the true analytics you need is available for these larger databases," Toman explained.
From a business sense there are several interesting aspects to this:
- It's a "mixed source" solution, one that still results in a definite price tag.
- Google should now be seen as being very serious about the enterprise space.
- Google's willingness to partner with a virtual start-up in Kazeon is also significant.
Toman also broke down for me how the costs stack up. Google's search appliance starts at $30,000. Kazeon's IS1200 then costs $40,000, and there's about $10,000 to tie everything together. That $80,000 is a starting point.
Kazeon CEO Sudhakar Muddu also explained how all this will go to market. "Google has a good enterprise sales force. We’re doing a lot of sales calls with Google.
"Google is not looking at this as an open source," he added. "It’s a question of solving the problems of legal compliiance. How do you extend a search to billions of files. Google’s interface means you don’t have to learn our product, you can go deep into archives and backups."
Got that, Ollie?