Over the last few months, many of you have been busy installing beta versions of SharePoint 2010 and scanning the internet for information hidden in blogs regarding the search functionality being shipped with the product. There was a whole debate just before Christmas around whether or not SharePoint 2010 would be shipped with the FAST Enterprise Search Engine (ESP) as a core element of the install. Well the good news is, yes it will. Furthermore, I hope to give you an insight into the core Microsoft search platforms and those included within SharePoint 2010.
Core Search Platforms
Microsoft currently provides 5 core search platforms.
1. Microsoft Search Server Express 2010.
2. Microsoft Search Server 2010.
3. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Search.
4. Microsoft SharePoint Search.
5. Fast Search Server for SharePoint 2010.
Each version of Search Server has a purpose and position within an enterprise depending on the Search strategy and size of site(s) you wish Search Server to cover. The following outlines each platform and when it’s best to select that particular Search Server.
Microsoft Search Server Express 2010
This is the baby of the group. It is a free download from Microsoft and like their other Express offerings is a cut down version of the full server application for individual or departmental usage. Search Server Express is to Search Server as Microsoft Access is to SQL Server. 
It has a single server architecture in as much that you can only deploy to a single server and is configured to crawl a Windows Share Point Services farm as an external data store. You and your customers should only consider using Search Server Express 2010 if you are looking for an entry level departmental solution where a single server model meets the needs of the business.
Microsoft Search Server 2010
This product is the stand alone search server aimed at enterprises who wish to implement a Search Strategy that scales out across multiple servers. Microsoft suggests that this platform be implemented if you require a solution which is required to service a large network and which is required to support multiple crawl servers and query servers. 
It has a scale performance limit of up to items and a suggested deployment scale of between 2 to 15+ servers although no further information is available on scaling beyond 15 servers at the moment. There is one index partition which includes the full index and a primary copy of the query components and a mirror copy. For redundancy purposes the mirror copy is placed upon the second server, hence the minimum requirements for 2 servers within the deployment architecture. The administration component is on the crawl server which has one crawler associated with the single crawl database.
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Search
If your customer does not require enterprise search capabilities but still wishes to provision search within SharePoint 2010 then Foundation Search is the answer. This platform provides built-in search capabilities 
for SharePoint site collections which have been developed as a single site collection. It is not suitable for crawling external data sources outside the SharePoint domain and hence doesn’t provision a service to crawl external data sources. It is reasonably easy to get this up and running as most of the Search Services can be automatically configured from within SharePoint and the crawler automatically indexes items without setting up scheduled crawls and hence does not require an administrator to control the schedule. The platform can be deployed across a single server in the same manner as Search Server Express. However unlike Search Server Express you can scale out the server to increase the capacity of the search farm. Each Search server uses a separate crawl database for indexing and for performance enhancement for requests. Each server is assigned to crawl a separate content store and as with Search Server it can support up to items per index. To further enhance the search performance Foundation Search databases can be deployed to its own, dedicated instance of SQL Server.
Microsoft Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
The final Search Server available from Microsoft is the Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. This product is the ultimate search platform and includes all the search features and integration capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010 and complements this with ability to scale and provision enhanced content processing capabilities. The Fast Search platform should be considered when your customer requires scale and performance. The ability to crawl different types of internal and external content including large scale web based content with the ability to 
custom tune results for relevancy and navigation. Fast also gives your customer the ability to use customized pipes for content processing such as property extraction from documents, lemmatization, and synonym addition on during content processing and indexation. The deployment architecture for Fast takes advantage of SharePoint 2010 query servers and uses the SharePoint Crawling services to populate its indexes within the Fast farm. The Fast farm can be shared across multiple SharePoint farms and provisions index partitions, content processing and query processing services. There is no ideal topology when implementing a Fast farm and the size of the SharePoint Server 2010 farm will be based upon the overall needs of the SharePoint Server Services such as the volume of data being crawled and the performance requirements of the query servers although Fast does reduce the loading of these servers.
Well I hope this has given you insight into Microsoft’s Search Platform and the different options available. Further information can be found on the Microsoft TechNet site.
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