FAST announces real-time information retrieval for large data volumes

"FAST Data Search allows organizations to build cost efficient information retrieval `supercomputers' that continue to scale with both query and data volume," said FAST Chief Executive Officer John M. Lervik. "Essentially we have figured out a way to allow corporations to deploy an arbitrary sized slice of our FAST Web Search engine, except that now, in addition to publicly available Web pages, we'll be searching through terabytes of data like transaction histories and corporate documents. FAST Data Search makes all this data available online with sub-second response from a single easy to use standard search engine bar. Just type in what you are looking for, click on the search button, and you'll get back highly relevant results. It couldn't be easier."

Using the same core technology that powers the world's freshest Internet search engine, FAST's AlltheWeb.com, FAST Data Search increases transaction efficiency and slashes storage costs by offloading information retrieval requests (user queries) from a company's existing OLTP systems, enabling the OLTP database to process a greater number of revenue-generating transactions per second. FAST Data Search dramatically lowers storage costs by allowing the migration of transaction-based historical and corporate document data from high-end storage systems to cost-efficient PC and Sun servers.

FAST plans to co-market FAST Data Search in conjunction with major hardware manufacturers, including Dell, large data center hosting companies, and system integrators.

"Together, Dell and FAST are responding to a number of significant opportunities to deliver a robust information retrieval solution supported by Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage systems," said Joe Marengi, senior vice president and general manager of the Americas Business Unit for Dell. "We have mutual customers who need the capability of searching through enormous amounts of information in a timely, cost-effective manner."

"Qwest and FAST are in the process of identifying major Qwest customers who may benefit from the combination of FAST's powerful new Data Search technology and Qwest's state-of-the art CyberCenter hosting and professional service offerings," said Joel Arnold, Executive Vice President, Global Accounts for Qwest Communications International Inc.

FAST Data Search is ideally suited for corporate environments in which large amounts of historical data exist and new data is constantly being generated and/or updated, or where any type or amount of business data needs to searched in real-time. FAST Data Search offers inherent fault tolerance through its parallel architecture design, and provides sub-second response times in configurations ranging from a single server searching 50 GB of data 50 times per second, to advanced configurations with hundreds of servers scaling to more than 250 terabytes of data and capable of thousands of queries per second. The FAST Data Search solution seamlessly integrates with an e-business's existing IT system, turning it into a powerful information retrieval system. FAST Data Search uses a unified, customizable `search engine' interface and aggregates data from databases like Oracle and IBM DB2, Web servers, file servers, XML sources and a wide variety of other public and proprietary document types.

FAST Data Search is also the ideal solution for e-businesses. According to Jupiter research, 80 percent of online users will abandon an e-commerce site if the search functionality is poor.(1) FAST Data Search solves this problem by increasing the speed and performance of searches, leading to increases in customer loyalty, successfully completed transactions and, most importantly, generation of additional page views and revenue.

FAST Data Search is available for Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows 2000/NT, and Red Hat Linux platforms, and will be available in Q1 2002 on HP-UX and AIX platforms.