Out-of-control document management plagues businesses of every dimension. Duplicate documents, multiple file formats, poor filing practices, buried files, and files spread far and wide in multiple repositories are some of the common problems facing users looking for documents both living and archived. The answer is to index those documents into a central database. But how do you efficiently index thousands or perhaps millions of documents in such a way as to be both fast and efficient? The simple solution is a search appliance that performs the task for you.

A search appliance is a dedicated computer with a small footprint (1U or 2U) whose only task in life is to provide indexing and searching services to your users or customers. All appliances ship with a Web-based interface for easy administration and end-user document search and retrieval. Most search appliance manufacturers provide multiple appliance levels to fit your budget or specific indexing needs. This list of seven enterprise search appliances, identified by ServerWatch, is in no particular order.

A word of caution is in order when comparing search appliances and their pricing models. Most appliance vendors charge by how many documents you want to index. A few charge by the amount of data you're indexing, while others have no limit on the number of documents or the data volume.

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