(I apologize in advance if I missed something in your documentation, but I've read through the Wiki on the subject of distributed searches and didn't find anything conclusive)
We are currently evaluating Solr and Autonomy. Solr is attractive due to its open source background, following and price. Autonomy is expensive, but we know for a fact that it can handle our distributed search requirements perfectly. What we need to know is if Solr has capabilities that match or roughly approximate Autonomy's Distributed Search Handler. What it does it acts as a front-end for all of Autonomy's IDOL search servers (which correspond in this scenario to Solr shards). It is configured to know what is on each shard, which servers hold each shard and intelligently farms out queries based on that configuration. There is no need to specify which IDOL servers to hit while querying; the DiSH just knows where to go. Additionally, I believe in cases where an index piece is mirrored, it also monitors server health and falls back intelligently on other backup instances of a shard/index piece based on that. I'd appreciate it if someone can give me a frank explanation of where Solr stands in this area. Thanks, Mike
