FIND Servers

Vote:
 

Hi,

I had a question posted to me the other day asking me what a reliable fall back option we have in place if the Episerver FIND Server were ever to fail. This was a great question as we had never thought this could be possible. We presumed that the FIND servers were load balanced and this event would be almost impossible.

I was wondering if someone could tell me what the best way to implement a Fall Back option is if in the event that the FIND servers would fail?

Are there anyother reliable serach options that we could use?

Many thanks

Jon

#87465
Jun 13, 2014 10:43
Vote:
 

Hi,

Any thoughts on this post?

#87500
Jun 16, 2014 9:32
Vote:
 

I would go for the standard search solution in EPiServer that is free. Will of course not give all functionality but should be decent enough for that one day per year event that EPiServer Find is down. 

Can be implemented using either some fancy architecture or 2 different page types for search (one for Find and one for standard) and a switch on start page (property to point our which search to use). Although I like the idea of implementing 2 separate repositories for search and switch them out depending on what gives error, I would go for the easy route and use 2 separate pagestypes for search in this case.

This would take me around 20h to implement and at zero license cost as a reference.

If you really really need a fancy search all the time you might want to check out SOLR as backup solution. Takes much longer time to implement however but also gives similar options as EPiServer Find but at zero license cost. So that's your premium solution. If you haven't played with SOLR before it'll probably be a few hundred hours though to build a good search including faceting, auto complete etc etc

3rd option is free. Skip it. :)

#87512
Jun 16, 2014 11:04
Vote:
 

I've just had a message through from EPiServer HQ saying that uptime for find last year was 99.99% So 4 nines being less then an hour a year. So assuming this is going to be true next year it might not be an enormous issue for you - so long as your site doesn't actually blow up on the rare occaisions that find isn't available

That said the dev index has been up an down like a box of frogs over the last couple of days so i see why you (and me) might be a little worried.

Cheers

#87701
Jun 19, 2014 15:59
Vote:
 

I should not be to worried that the servers for find is going down. I would be much more worried about your own servers going down. In the case of find you can get SLA that is really good.

A sugestion could be that main pages of your website should not depend to much on find though. Deliver you content from the CMS as much as possible and as mentioned above have the build in search deliver the search result if Find is down.

Installing a on premise solution could also be an answer but deliver the same SLA that EPiServer does could very hard to achieve.

#87709
Jun 19, 2014 17:50
* You are NOT allowed to include any hyperlinks in the post because your account hasn't associated to your company. User profile should be updated.