Endeca releases new McKinley search platform
Search goes to the mountaintop

Endeca has introduced the McKinley release of the Information Access Platform. Named after North America’s highest peak, the release is based upon what Endeca calls a fundamentally new architecture for building standards-based search applications. The new platform is designed for rapid development and maintenance of search applications that offer Endeca’s Guided Navigation user experience across the full range of structured and unstructured enterprise data. Endeca has also announced two search-based solutions, the Endeca Commerce Suite and the Endeca Publishing Suite.

Sue Feldman, research VP, Content Technologies Group, IDC, says, "Endeca’s new McKinley platform demonstrates the migration of search applications to the next wave of high performance search. Publishers will like the more automatically generated facets that enable browsing on the fly. Online commerce sites will be quick to utilize the parametric searches and the tools for merchandising. This is a good example of a scalable search plus browse platform that can unify access to multiple sources of both data and content. Partners will like the speed with which they can deploy new applications. The system is designed with usability in mind as well. These are the key ingredients that a modern search platform should offer."

Endeca claims the McKinley platform replaces traditional search engines that make building search applications too costly or difficult, and complements traditional enterprise applications by pulling together large volumes of diverse, changing information to support decision-making. The new platform adds more than 100 new features since its previous release, including a redesigned engine that delivers new capabilities and sets the foundation for continuing advancements in simplicity, speed and scale. Highlights of the McKinley release include:

New MDEX Engine technology for bigger, faster search applications with lower total cost of ownership. Endeca redesigned the core data storage architecture of the engine, leveraging innovative approaches for exploiting 64-bit memory architectures to access massive data volumes at unprecedented speeds. The redesigned engine is optimized to unlock the scale and performance made possible by the disruptive computing power available from today’s rapidly evolving, multicore CPU platforms.

Simplicity. Partners are building new plug-in features and applications. The MDEX Engine technology is now extensible through an open, XQuery-based Web services stack, and ships with a WS-I compliant SOAP service for easy enterprise interoperability. Those new capabilities allow for easy development of entirely new search applications as well as plug-in UI features, called cartridges.

Speed. Interactive response on diverse, changing data with less hardware. The new Continuous Query feature processes queries and data updates concurrently with no downtime, and Rapid Updates simplify and accelerate updates by allowing near real-time updating of the underlying engine. Together, those offer rich functionality while reducing total cost of ownership.

Scale: Tens of millions of records per box. The new MDEX Engine technology can now handle more data on the same hardware—up to a 100 percent increase, depending on the characteristics of the information. That means sub-second response on millions of documents and tens of millions of records on a single box. The McKinley platform is available now.