30.03.2020 | Blog Search and knowledge management for Big Data

NetApp provides market-leading, innovative storage solutions that help companies in all industries, including government agencies, store, manage, and protect data. This often involves storing enormous amounts of data on NetApp file systems. IntraFind offers NetApp customers an intelligent enterprise search solution that enables them to perform rights-checked searches in their data volumes and analyze them - with an index update in real time.

Quick and easy search for always up-to-date documents

NetApp storage solutions are ideal for storing large amounts of data and are often used by large companies and the public sector. Especially when so many files are stored, searching for relevant information is often difficult. Often, employees only have a metadata catalog search available for searching NetApp storage, without any content indexing. Finding is therefore a chance hit. As a rule, employees searching for a specific document or special information have to search with the available means in a tedious and time-consuming manner. They not only have to know in which directory the file was stored. They also need to know the name of the document in order to perform the search. Users may also not even know that there are other, perhaps more recent documents on a particular topic or in which directory they are stored.

To help employees quickly find the data relevant for their work, IntraFind offers iFinder, a NetApp-certified software for intelligent full text search in NetApp file services. The software, which executes complex calculations in the background to determine the most relevant search results, is easy to use in the frontend: By entering a keyword in the search input field, employees can easily find the information they need to complete their daily tasks. After typing just a few letters, the autocomplete function with typo correction provides suggestions, and filters can be used to narrow down the search further. The intelligent linguistics function also takes synonyms into account and helps to find multi-word terms such as "quality management handbook". Regardless of whether the user searches for "book", "books" or "quality", the results for " quality management handbook " are displayed. The software also automatically recognizes proper names of persons, places or organizations in the full text of the document.

As iFinder supports more than 600 file formats, the user can access a preview of the document without having to install the respective application, such as Microsoft Visio, on the computer. The respective matches in the individual hit documents are marked in color, so that the employee has a good overview of the documents in question. In the case of an extensive document, for example, the user can jump straight to the first match found on page 37.

One of the central considerations when using this type of search software in companies and authorities is the consideration of permissions. Thanks to Secure Search, users only find documents that they are authorized to access at the moment of their search request.

NetApp real-time indexing

A special feature of iFinder is the real-time indexing in NetApp file systems: Thanks to the certified NetApp push connector, changes to documents in NetApp file systems are processed immediately without lengthy crawling. All changes - including changes to access rights - on the NetApp filer are thus taken into account by the search engine in real time and have an immediate effect on the hit list. In this way, the employee always has access to the most up-to-date data. Up to now, IntraFind is the only enterprise search provider that has a certified NetApp push connector.
Customers with hundreds of terabytes of files such as Daimler, the Berlin police or Diakonie (Protestant Agency for Diakonie and Development) appreciate these advantages.

Intelligent information networking for data analysis

Thanks to numerous connectors, e.g. to Microsoft Exchange, Atlassian Confluence, Microsoft SharePoint, ERP or CRM systems, iFinder can be upgraded to a company or authority-wide, universal search solution. All data sources can be connected and it is possible to search several hundred million documents without any problems.
By applying advanced machine learning methods, the software also implements information networking within the company and augments existing data-based business processes: Relevant information is not only found, but also intelligently linked. The data is automatically enriched with the relevant metadata or provided with appropriate labels to enable sorting and further processing. This gives companies an overview of which types of personal data, confidential data or data subject to export control are stored in the company and can act accordingly on the basis of this information.

Learn more about Enterprise Search for NetApp file services