Every Sitecore instance includes search. You cant avoid it. The question is which product or provider fits your needs and scales with your growth. Usually this comes down to environment (mostly your network), cost, and the team’s willingness to try out new cloud architectures. If your team has chosen Apache Solr then you have a range of ways of implementation. Most Sitecore customers tend to choose Solr for its free open source architecture however the trade off is more development hours than top tier commercial products.
SearchStax is an interesting new software as a service product to Apache Solr hosting that fits in the middle of free and commercial cloud scale. Using a snazzy dashboard, teams can deploy and manage your Solr Cloud instances securely with ease. If you have ever deployed Apache Solr, then you are quite aware of the many challenges facing IT Professionals: installation, failover, security, maintenance, and scale. SearchStax provides solutions to teams for the most challenging issues for developing with Solr. The strawberry on top of the cake is your team can try it FREE of charge for 14 days.
Below is the current offering from SearchStax.
- 14-Day Free Trial
- Latest Solr(5.x, 6.x) and Zookeeper versions
- IP Filter and Basic Authentication Security
- New or Custom Plugin Support
- Support for multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure)
- Support for content that resides on or off your hosted Sitecore platform
- Support for code promotion workflows e.g. development to staging and then to production
- Support for Solr Query Boost and Custom Query Parser
- Multicore: Support multiple collections within a single deployment of Solr
- Configuration and Control: More control over your Solr Configuration files.
- Performance Monitoring and Email Alerts
- Add and Delete Solr Nodes for high availability/fault tolerance
- Manual and Scheduled Backups
Our company has worked with the Sitecore and SearchStax teams to deploy multiple search deployments. We offer architecture advice and implementation at a great industry rate. For more information click here.
