Making enterprise storage more search-friendly

ABSTRACT

The focus of this work is to determine how to enhance storage systems to make search and indexing faster and better able to produce relevant answers. Enterprise search engines often run in appliances that must access the file system through standard network file system protocols (NFS, CIFS). As such, they are not able to take advantage of features that may be offered by the storage system. This work explores the types of APIs that a storage system can expose to a search engine to better enable it to do its job. We make the case that by exposing certain information we can make search faster and more relevant.