AI Search for OpenSearch is now available in Public Preview on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform. This fully managed solution makes it simple to add AI-powered search to your stack, reducing operational overhead and accelerating your path to smarter discovery experiences using OpenSearch.
Traditional keyword search methods can deliver quick results, but they often miss the mark when users have queries that are more nuanced or have deeper meaning.
AI Search for OpenSearch overcomes these challenges. With this new solution, you gain access to semantic, hybrid, and multimodal search capabilities. These features enable your search engine to deliver results that genuinely understand what users mean—instead of simply matching keywords.
What is AI Search for OpenSearch?
AI Search can turn your OpenSearch deployment into an end-to-end AI-powered search solution in just minutes by allowing you to:
- Instantly deploy a range of built-in ML models to automatically generate vector embeddings for incoming data.
- Provision a vector index ingestion pipeline, providing a streamlined endpoint for data ingestion into OpenSearch.
- Store vector embeddings accessibly and cost-effectively in a vector index.
- Search data using advanced techniques such as semantic and multi-modal search.
OpenSearch AI Search Pipeline ingests data and automatically generates and stores embeddings in a vector index, making contextual search queries possible for end users.
Once deployed, AI Search enables next-generation search solutions such as:
- Enhanced relevance with semantic search. Returns more relevant results by understanding the meaning of the query. For example, a query like “Why is my internet so slow today?” retrieves insights on network congestion or ISP issues with semantic search instead of just matching ‘internet slow today’ with keyword search.
- Improved precision with hybrid search. Combine the benefits of semantic search with the efficiency of keyword search making retrieved results more relevant and performant.
- Expand your queries with multimodal search. Use both text and image data with multimodal embeddings to unlock richer search results.
- Boost efficiency with neural sparse search. Use lightweight sparse embedding vectors instead of more complex dense embeddings to help reduce cost and query speed.
Why use Instaclustr for your AI Search needs?
AI Search for OpenSearch on Instaclustr is different to other solutions due to the fact that it’s flexible and deployable on any public cloud or on-premises. Additionally, it’s 100% open source meaning no expensive licensing fees to access advanced AI features.
However, AI features introduce new components—models, inference, and vector storage. This is where the NetApp Instaclustr platform helps, managing the added complexity with:
- Managed operations. Provisioning, scaling, patching, observability and security is all handled for you.
- Multi‑cloud choice. Run on AWS, GCP, Azure, or on‑premises with consistent tooling.
- Support. Our team of OpenSearch specialists are available 24×7 to help with any problems that may arise and we provide enterprise‑grade SLAs.
“Our customers want powerful, trustworthy search without adding operational complexity. AI search in our managed OpenSearch offering is designed to make semantic and hybrid capabilities straightforward to adopt—backed by the scale, security, and reliability NetApp Instaclustr is known for. We aim to enable teams to ship smarter discovery and search experiences, faster.”
— Ben Slater, Vice President and General Manager, NetApp Instaclustr
As active contributors to the OpenSearch community, we’re excited to help you move beyond keyword matching to intent-aware relevance. With AI search, OpenSearch generates embeddings during indexing and querying, so you can search by meaning—not just exact terms—while we manage the reliability, scaling, and security.
Getting started with AI Search
Whether you’re already using OpenSearch or planning a migration, we can help you take advantage of AI search. AI Search for OpenSearch can be deployed without provisioning additional nodes or infrastructure, so it’s easy to get started with your existing set up.
Existing customers can contact support to discuss adopting AI Search for your managed OpenSearch deployments. For new customers, contact our team to get started today and unlock the power of next-generation search.
Please note that during this preview stage, SLAs are not applicable and there may be substantial changes prior to GA release. Please contact the Instaclustr Sales Team if you would like to explore using the preview release for production usage.
