Howard,
Hi!!!
RE: What is FAST??
Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner..
I've read this many times...here it is...Tell me what you think..Patrick...Drew....Scott and others have discussed this with me...If DELL can pull this off...
"A million old soldiers will fade away......"
:o)
Best, Kemble
Subj: Think Fast!
Date: 5/4/99 8:50:34 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Fast, Dell Team to Build World's Biggest Search
Engine Service
Super-fast, Low-cost System Designed to Scale with Explosive Web
Growth
Offers 80 Million Searchable Documents Today; 200 Million Targeted for
Summer 1999, Quest for
Entire Web
BOSTON and ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 4, 1999-- Fast Search &
Transfer(TM) (FAST(TM)),
owner of highly advanced search engine technology, today announced that it
has teamed with Dell Computer Corporation
(Nasdaq:DELL - news), the world's leading direct computer systems company,
to build a next-generation search engine
service powered by Dell systems.
The two companies, initially leveraging a strong supplier/customer
relationship, have constructed an advanced search capability
using a high-performance, low-cost software/hardware system able to search
virtually the entire Web in response to every
request, with outstanding speed and relevance of results. FAST plans to
offer this new search engine service via OEM
agreements with major portals and partnerships with destination sites, and
has begun discussions with Dell about how the
FAST Search technology can be exposed to Dell customers.
Today the new FAST Search(TM) service -- running on Dell® PowerEdge® 4300
servers and Dell PowerVault(TM) storage
systems -- offers users 80 million searchable documents at the Web address
alltheweb.com. This makes the new
service ''larger than several of today's leading search engines,'' according
to Danny Sullivan, editor, Search Engine Watch.
FAST aims to expand this search universe aggressively by leveraging its
uniquely scalable architecture to offer end users the
world's biggest search engine, with more than 200 million searchable
documents available worldwide by summer 1999. Beyond
this milestone, FAST plans to take on the challenge of growing the search
service until the current contents of the entire Web
are captured, cataloged and available worldwide. Forrester Research, a
leading industry research firm, estimates the World
Wide Web currently contains 500 to 600 million documents.
''Several of today's major search engines have not increased significantly
in size for over a year,'' said Sullivan. ''If FAST can
offer a search solution that can both keep pace with the growth of the Web
and provide relevant results, it will become a
significant player in the search marketplace.''
Once FAST has captured and cataloged the Web's current information resource,
the company plans an aggressive discovery
and cataloging program to remain in synch with the explosive growth of the
Web, which Forrester Research predicts will grow
to be one billion documents by 2000.
''Size isn't everything; but if you can have both size and relevancy, then
you are able to please all types of users,'' said Sullivan.
''General web surfers and research professionals can both be served.
Moreover, as the web continues to grow, search engines
must index a sizeable number of the documents available. The announcement
from FAST adds new pressure for search engines
to be both biggest and best.''
Good News for End-Users
Web users count on search engines to locate all relevant pages and
automatically rank the best information in the first or second
screen of search results. What many users don't realize is that some of
today's major portals may search as little as 10 percent
of the Web with each query(1). This problem is exacerbated because some of
the current search engine solutions, while having
advanced rapidly, have trouble keeping up with the weed-like proliferation
of new documents on the Web. As a result, users
may well be missing the very Web site ''gems'' they are looking for because
their search engine doesn't offer a complete search
of the World Wide Web. The FAST Search service aims to change all of that.
''FAST is delivering, on our powerful standards-based server and storage
systems, a scalable search engine technology that
can search the entire contents of the Web and offer the retrieval speed and
relevance users want,'' said Michael Lambert,
senior vice president of Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. ''We are also
excited about the longer-term prospects for this kind of
search technology in corporate computing environments, where intranet home
pages are beginning to be considered portal-like
and in need of search engine technology that increases and facilitates
access to information.''
Big Search, More Cost-Effective Power for Portals
Today's e-commerce destination sites and portals need more search capability
than ever before. Unlike other parts of the
industry where having 'more' means the price goes down, the cost of building
and running a search engine tends to go up as the
information resource on the Web gets bigger and transaction rates get
higher. The FAST Search service, using an advanced
distributed architecture based on an ever-expanding array of commercially
available PowerEdge servers and PowerVault
storage systems, scales linearly so that the second or third hundred million
documents can cost the same to build and make
available as the first hundred million. By leveraging the reliability,
power, and price/performance of Dell PowerEdge servers and
PowerVault storage systems, FAST can build a search infrastructure that
keeps up with the tremendous growth of the Web for
a fraction of the cost typically associated with this effort. The ultimate
beneficiary of the cost-efficient FAST architecture is the
consumer, since it enables FAST to take on the challenge of building a
search of the entire Web.
''FAST has proven that Dell's technology platform easily scales to support
the most demanding applications while offering the
24x7 mission-critical operational support needed for a major portal
infrastructure,'' said Espen Brodin, president and CEO of
FAST. ''Searching 'All the Web, All the Time(TM)' means that FAST Search
will never stop growing, and that means we are
depending on Dell to always deliver us the best price/performance and most
reliable servers available. By working closely with
Dell, we hope to expose a significant number of Dell customers to the
benefits of FAST Search.''
How FAST Works: ''Organic'' Application Architecture Grows with Web
Founded in 1997, Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) was the brainchild of several
Ph.D. students and professors from the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The FAST founders believed
the industry lacked a search technology
custom-designed for the unique challenge of finding, cataloging, and
retrieving the vast amounts of changing information from the
Web.
''Most inventors of search solutions were attempting to build their new
architectures using conventional ideas of parallel data
processing, or based on large million dollar-class servers that are
expensive to upgrade and support,'' said John M. Lervik,
chief technology officer of FAST. ''We set about rebuilding this software
from the ground up, and it was critical that it meet
two basic criteria: being capable of scaling non-stop with Web growth --
infinitely if necessary -- and that it run on
standards-based hardware to keep the platform cost as low as possible.
''The FAST team's conceptual breakthrough was inventing a software approach
that transformed the Web search engine from
an inactive 'non living' application into an 'organic' application that
continues to grow every day as new Web sites are added.''
Lervik continued, ''Crucial to this organic application approach are several
innovations: a search engine architecture that scales
linearly both in data volume and traffic; high capacity spidering combined
with ultra-fast indexing algorithms to assure fresh,
up-to-date content; highly efficient search engine kernel software that
utilizes every ounce of PC server performance; and large
arrays of standard-based servers, storage systems, and interconnects to
achieve a low cost.''
For more information about Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerVault
storage systems go to
dell and
dell.com. For more information
on FAST and its products, visit the FAST World Wide Web site at www.fast.no.
About Fast Search & Transfer ASA
Fast Search & Transfer ASA (FAST), headquartered in Oslo, Norway, and with
US and UK subsidiaries, is a
high-technology research and development company delivering advanced and
innovative search and image/video compression
technologies for intranets, extranets, and the Internet. The company
develops and markets fully scalable cost-efficient software
and hardware, ranging from small and mid-size solutions to solutions for the
largest Internet content providers and media
companies. Applications include the world's largest search engines and the
highest performance image compression technology
available for the Internet. FAST is traded on the OTC market in Oslo,
Norway. |
