CASE STUDY

Architizer Selects SearchStax Cloud
to Upgrade Search Infrastructure

SearchStax's Solr expertise and service are top notch and really helped us make the right decisions around upgrade versioning and strategy around replication and sharding. The SearchStax software itself was great - automating some really time consuming tasks and getting us deployed and in production within days - allowing us to focus on new feature development. I would highly recommend SearchStax to other companies looking for a complete search solution for their Apache Solr Infrastructure. ROI on this project versus doing it ourselves was at least 10x.

Software Engineer
ARCHITIZER | David Rowe

About

Architizer is how architects find building-products. We connect over 25,000 architecture firms with the world’s leading building-product manufacturers.

Need

Architizer needed to upgrade their aging search infrastructure. As their search collections and traffic have grown exponentially, search infrastructure has stagnated. They could do the upgrades and management themselves, but that would take valuable time and resources away from development of new features. In addition, upgrading Apache Solr two major versions could lead to an unknown number of issues.

Situation

Architizer has an ambitious mission to empower architects with information to build better buildings, better cities, and a better world. They’re doing this by building a platform that connects over 25,000 architecture firms with the world’s leading building-product manufacturers. With exponential growth in both content and traffic, Architizer sought to invest in its search infrastructure—upgrading their Apache Solr versions, while continuing to innovate on their product feature set and support scalability as their search requirements continue to grow. Architizer needed to upgrade their legacy Solr versions 4.6 to the current 6.x version.

The Architizer team determined they had a couple of options:

  • DIY: Upgrade and maintain the Solr search system in the cloud themselves. This would include setting up Solr clusters, configurations, backup systems, and require continuous monitoring and management of the search infrastructure itself.
  • Outsource: Find a vendor who could do this for them that has deep expertise in Solr, cloud computing, and have them provide Service Level Agreement (SLA)-backed 24x7x365 developer support and uptime guarantees.

Solution

Architizer was initially tempted to implement Solr on their own as a do-it-yourself project – they certainly had the talent on board to do it. However, as they investigated the time and resources required they quickly realized it made much more sense to outsource their Solr needs to SearchStax and implement SearchStax Cloud hosted and managed Solr solution.

Architizer could then focus on building a great search experience and not be distracted with the day-to-day management and maintenance of their Solr search infrastructure. In addition, Architizer could avoid all of the upgrade hassles and issues by simply having SearchStax handle it – no need to do the updates themselves. Overall this would reduce their total cost of ownership and accelerate the timeline for modernizing their search infrastructure and upgrading their Solr versions.

The SearchStax team engaged with the Architizer team and utilizing SearchStax quickly built and deployed a multi-node production environment. SearchStax enabled the Architizer team to upgrade their Solr versions and migrate all of their collections to their new search infrastructure.

Since all production SearchStax clusters are front-ended with load balancers, high availability was ensured. The Architizer team didn’t want to become experts in search or be on the hook for 24×7 support so they opted for Platinum-level SearchStax support which included around the clock proactive monitoring and support as well as less than one hour incident response times.

Product

Cloud

Platform

Custom

Location

North America

Industry

Architecture