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Google binning its search appliance hardware business

Hardware's gone, but Google's way of doing things won the day. Next stop: cloud

Google looks like it has binned its search appliances.

Appliances were Google's first attempt to create an enterprise business and debuted way back in 2002, when the idea of a server dedicated to indexing content and providing a web search experence behind the firewall sounded like a grand idea. Innumerable advances in storage technology later, Google's decided the appliance is no longer needed.

Google partner Percifient has blogged about the appliances' demise, and numerous reports reproduce a letter sent to users and resellers to the effect that the devices won't be sold after 2017. Users can extend support for a couple of years beyond 2016, but after that you're on your own … unless you cut over to Google's next enterprise search product.

Which by good fortune is described, sketchily, in the email Google is sending to Search Appliance users.

The new offering will be a cloud service and “will be assistive and powered by machine intelligence.” Google's already testing the product and says this is evolution because in 2002 it made sense to do search on-premises but since then this cloud thing came along.

Google's search appliances never rose above niche status, so this is not a major reversal for the company.

It's also unfair to rate the appliances a failure, as in the early noughties storage companies were trying to advance data management regimes that suggested organisations create taxonomies and apply them to their data assets, the better to make them accessible and to help storage hardware understand how to tier files for cost-effective storage. Few recall or dare mention the concepts like information lifecycle management (ILM) common in those far-off days and fewer of the enterprise content management companies advancing those ideas remain in good health.

Automation has taken care of ILM and tiering, while free-form search enabled by indexing has just come to be the way things get done. Gruntier servers and cheaper disk have helped, but Google's ideas of how to find information have arguably survived even if its appliances won't. ®

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