The FAST to Solr Migration of Norway's DN.no Publication

The enterprise search consultants over at Cominvent recently held a talk with NHST at the GoOpen 2011 Open Source conference in Oslo, Norway.  The talk was about NHST's migration from the FAST ESP search platform to Apache Solr.  Although the slides are in norwegian, Cominvent provided a nice english transcript.  

NHST, a norwegian media group, publishers online newspapers such as DN.no, a financial publication.  DN.no was the focus of NHST's talk; that publication was migrated to Solr.

Summary:

Solr is a lot less resource demanding than FAST. Can easily run virtualized or in the cloud. NHST scaled into the Amazon EC2 cloud during the peak period of the tax list search last year.

Each developer may run a local copy of Solr on his laptop, this was very hard with FAST.

Cleaner architecture than before, more flexible with multiple cores.

A big win to gather all search related business logic into a common search middleware, including a JSP presentation layer.

Superb tuning possibilities, easier to tune than the old engine.

Although there were challenges and we had to sacrifice entity extraction in the first phase, we’re very happy with the decision to migrate to Solr.

The transcript goes into further detail about the background, reasoning, and execution of the migration.

To read the full post, follow the Reference Box link.