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CASE STUDY

Sitecore Relies on Managed Solr for Stable, Secure and Robust Solr

Sitecore upgraded to Sitecore 10 and used SearchStax to shift from Azure Search to Solr

There are a lot of benefits for going with SearchStax – and it goes beyond having to manage Solr. We ended up with a more robust solution.

Derek Hunziker
Digital Technology Director

About

Founded in 2001, Sitecore delivers a digital experience platform that empowers brands worldwide to build lifelong relationships with their customers. Sitecore is the only company bringing together content, commerce, and data into one connected platform that delivers millions of digital experiences every day.

Sitecore has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXPs for four consecutive years and more than 5,200 brands use Sitecore to power their digital customer experiences.

Situation

Sitecore uses their own digital experience platform to manage and run their website. In previous versions of the Sitecore DXP, customers had an option to choose between Solr or Azure Search to manage the search infrastructure. When Sitecore Experience Platform™ 10 was released in Fall 2020, Solr became the recommended technology to manage the search infrastructure.

This shift from Azure Cognitive Search to Solr required Sitecore to migrate its search infrastructure to Solr Search in Sitecore to be compatible with the current and future versions of the Sitecore DXP.

Solution

The Sitecore team implemented a 2-node, high availability, dedicated Managed Solr cluster hosted in the Azure cloud for their production environment. They also added a smaller dedicated single Solr node for their non-production environment. For support, Sitecore selected a SearchStax Platinum Support package that provides 24x7x365 coverage with 99.9% uptime backed by a service level agreement.

Due to changing business requirements after implementation began, the Sitecore team determined the deployment needed to be done on a later version of the Sitecore platform instead of Sitecore 9.1.1, which also required a new version of Solr. At the same time, the entire Solr instance was migrated from Azure US West data center to the US East data center to improve search latency for the Company’s growing market in Europe.

The SearchStax team quickly responded and was able to complete the data center migration in a single day.

In addition to the system alerts set up in a standard implementation, SearchStax also implemented five additional alerts so Sitecore could be proactive in what was happening with their Solr environment.

Results

With SearchStax Managed Search, the Sitecore team experienced a more stable, secure and robust environment for Solr. They also saved time on their recent upgrade and were able to accelerate project timelines.

The performance and accuracy of search is also improved in Sitecore’s new Solr environment. This is especially noticeable in the Knowledge Center and Customer Stories sections of the website that rely heavily on Solr indexes.

Product

Managed Search

Platform

Sitecore

Location

North America

Industry

Technology

Let’s talk about how you can drive better onsite search experiences and gain insights with SearchStax

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Sitecore Relies on Managed Solr for Stable, Secure and Robust Solr

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