EMC World 2011: EMC utilises Google Search Appliance in VNX storage system

Connector aims to increase productivity by ensuring up-to-date intranet search results

EMC announced at EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas that the Google Search Appliance (GSA) will be made available as a connector within its VNX unified storage system.

According to EMC, GSA will improve the speed and accuracy of search results with on-the-fly indexing for content stored on the systems, and consequently increase employee productivity.

Every time an employee searches for content stored on the VNX storage system, which could include anything from documents to multimedia files, the GSA references its index to provide a timely and up-to-date result.

Employees will be able to search for information at a more granular level, such as departmental or author level, and the system will include support for GSA dynamic navigation - exploring search results by using specific metadata attributes.

EMC has also incorporated event notification in the integration between GSA and VNX, so a notification will be sent to GSA automatically any time a file is changed or edited on the VNX storage system. This will ensure search results remain accurate.

"Our goal is to make searching for information inside of a business as easy, fast and relevant as it is to search on Google.com," said Matt Eichner, general manager of Global Enterprise Search at Google.

"We were impressed with EMC's implementation of our onboard connector technology for the GSA. Leveraging EMC VNX to flag the GSA for content changes on VNX storage systems is exactly the type of innovation we encourage of all of our enterprise search partners."

The new connector for the VNX unified storage system will be made available later this year.