It’s not uncommon to have multiple SharePoint content databases for a single SharePoint application.  The separation of site collections into different content databases is typically done in an attempt to work around content database size recommendations provided by Microsoft (see Microsoft’s Plan for Software Boundaries document for more information).  In many cases organizations have one content database per site collection.  After deploying StoragePoint into your existing SharePoint farm the next logical step is to run the externalize job(s) which will relocate your existing content outside of the content database.  Once completed you will be left with very small content databases that can now be merged (note that you will have to run the DBCC_ShrinkDB script several times to reclaim your unused database space or rebuild table indexes before running dbcc_shrinkDB.  For more information consult the StoragePoint Administrator’s Guide).  Merging SharePoint content databases can be done using the stsadm command. Execute the steps below to merge your content databases.

Prerequisites

1. **** Important!  Microsoft recommends applying the April Cumulative Update before you merge content databases.  There are known issues with this merge database command prior to this update.
2. Even though your content databases will be very small after relocating BLOBs with StoragePoint’s externalize job, you must make sure you have enough free space to merge content databases.  The general rule is that you must have at least three times the size of source site collections database size.  *** Note:  Do not use the value returned for the StorageUsedMB property when running the stsadm -o enumsites -url webappurl to determine your database size.  With StoragePoint deployed this property will reflect the total space used by content in SharePoint but not the actual size of the content database. 
3. In order to execute the following STSADM command you must be a member of the Farm Administrators group and be an Administrator on the local computer.  Additionally you need to have Full Control permission for any site collection being moved.  For SQL Server, you must be a member of the db_owner database role.

Steps to Merge Content Databases

1. From a SharePoint server in your farm, open a command prompt and navigate to %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft shared\Web server extensions\12\Bin
2. Type the following STSTADM Command
   STSADM –o mergecontentdbs –url <url of web application> –sourcedatabasename <source db name> –destinationdatabasename <dest. db name> –operation2
   
   Note that the URL is the URL of the web application that contains the site collection.  This is not the URL of the site collection itself.
   Operation2 = full database merge
3. Restart IIS by running iisreset/noforce from a command prompt.

As I'm sure everyone can imagine we get asked a lot of questions about our offering on a daily basis across a wide range of topics.  As we get closer to the launch of SharePoint 2010, those questions have started to revolve more and more around myths, misconceptions, and misstatements on what 2010 offers OOB.  The phenomenon happens every release cycle for SharePoint, given its large customer and partner ecosystems. 

Before we talk about the present, let's take a look back at 2007..."Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", George Santayana 1905.

In 2007, one of the primary functional areas of SharePoint that experienced this phenomenon was workflow.  It was OOB, you don't need solutions like K2, it's more than workflow it's true BPM, what you couldn't do OOB could be easily built with WF, and the list of falsehoods and fantasies went on.  Customers were led astray...they wasted a lot of time, money, and energy trying to roll their own solutions, with and without the help of Microsoft partners.  We also saw customers WAIT...they had real business challenges that could have been addressed with workflow/BPM, but they passed on addressing those challenges, in some case more than a year, thinking their problems would be fixed with the SharePoint 2007.  While I'm sure there were folks out there whose needs were met with the OOB capabilities 2007 delivered, a majority of folks were left with some combination of burnt fingers, frustration, and in some cases anger that still persists to this day.

Back to the the present.  While there are several functional/architectural areas of SharePoint that are experiencing this phenomenon, we're going to talk about the one that hits close to home for us here at BlueThread...Remote BLOB Storage.  I'll start by saying that I am surprised by the number of folks out there that don't even know this is an option.  I see blog posts or threads in forums where people describe painfully unnecessary processes for splitting larger content databases down into smaller, more manageable ones.  I feel bad for these folks because they are not at all being advised well by partners, and in some cases Microsoft themselves.  For the ones that do know about this option, let's try to separate fact from fiction:

• SharePoint EBS is deprecated in SharePoint 2010, so you should avoid SharePoint 2007 solutions and just wait for 2010.

Partially True: While EBS is deprecated in SharePoint 2010, that does not mean it is not supported.  As long as you are using a solution that will migrate from EBS to RBS at some point before it becomes unsupported then there is no reason to wait for 2010.  The reality is everybody is not going to immediately upgrade to 2010...money and/or business priority reasons will force many companies to wait.  But they don't have to wait to rid themselves of BLOBs...and the near-immediate ROI makes it a no-brainer.  For everyone's reference, our solution has a EBS to RBS upgrade built into the product...you can actually have active EBS and RBS storage profiles in place at the same time.  To convert an EBS profile to RBS you just create an RBS profile within the same scope of an EBS profile and run our Externalize job...it will "shallow copy" the BLOB references from EBS to RBS.  The conversion is that simple.

• You can't upgrade a SharePoint 2007 (WSS or MOSS) farm to 2010 with the content externalized from SQL.

100% False: There is no truth to this assertion at all.  In fact it works a whole lot better....read more here.

• You don't need a StoragePoint-like solution with 2010, it will do this OOB.

False: I could give that a partially true, but then I'd be giving credibility to the notion that the RBS FILESTREAM Provider is a viable solution for most enterprises.  I firmly believe that it's not and not because I want you to suspend reality and buy our stuff no matter what.  I believe that it's not viable because it was not designed, architected or built to address the needs that StoragePoint addresses.  It was built to provide a free upgrade path for companies that implemented WSS 3.0 using the WIDE (Windows Internal Database Engine) option.  There is no WIDE option for SharePoint Foundation Server, so the only free upgrade is SQL Express which has a 4GB database size limit.  The RBS FILESTREAM Provider was built to give these customers a way to remote the BLOBs as they upgraded.  Might not work for all of them, but it will work for most.

If you don't fit into the definition above (...WSS3/WIDE upgrade to 2010) then what's the benefit of this option?  It's doesn't perform better than leaving the BLOBs in the database.  You can't tier storage, or compress BLOBs, or encrypt them.  And oh BTW, Microsoft isn't recommending this option for you.  They've made the caveats pretty clear in presentations and blog posts that I've seen.

• I can build my own RBS solution.

True, but Not Recommended: Any reasonably talented .NET developer can build an RBS provider, either given the interface specification or some sample code.  So the question in my mind has always been why would you want to build your own RBS solution?  It's not completely trivial to build one and maintaining it over time as SharePoint and SQL hot fixes, cumulative updates, and service packs are delivered puts a significant burdon on an IT shop.  There is also a big difference in just building a provider and building a complete solution (admin tools, reporting and monitoring, compression, encryption, storage platform support, etc.) ruggedized enough to implement in a production environment.  You also don't benefit from the new innovations funded by a vendor's R&D dollars and the maintenance dollars of a large customer ecosystem.  In the end, this is not some web part or report or other component that doesn't bring your entire farm down if it breaks...if this thing breaks your entire SharePoint farm will be impacted in a very big way.  Look at it this way, every byte of every document that is uploaded into or retrieved from SharePoint will flow thru your provider. 

There are others, but these are the main ones that I wanted to talk about today.  So in summary, EBS is supported today and in 2010 (...DEPRECATED <> UNSUPPORTED), you can upgrade to 2010 with content externalized via EBS, StoragePoint provides an in-place upgrade between EBS and RBS, it's a stretch to suggest that there is an OOB RBS capability in SharePoint 2010, and while you can build your own RBS solution it should be done with a lot of care and consideration...recognizing that the RBS provider itself is not a complete solution.

Feel free to leave comments if you disagree.  Agreeable comments are welcome too.

As you may have noticed already, we've changed how we license and price StoragePoint.  We have a Standard Edition, which is available today for $4,995 per SharePoint server.  We're adding a Enterprise Edition in May that will have a wide range of new capabilities and will be priced at $9,995. 

Q1 2010 Promotion

For Standard Edition purchases made by March 1st, we are giving customers a free upgrade to the Enterprise Edition.  For reference, the Enterprise edition will have the following additional features over the Standard Edition:

• Intelligent Archiving – Move BLOBs to less expensive tiers of storage as they age or there is some change in their state (event or metadata change)
• Multiple storage end-points per profile – Write BLOBs to multiple locations synchronously or asynchronously or write to different locations based on size or type
• Monitoring and Reporting Tools – Monitor and report on the health of your BLOB store(s) by profile.
• Migrate Timer Job – Move BLOBs between end-points without having to run Recall and Externalization jobs.

Click HERE To request a no obligation quote with this special promotion or contact us at info@bluethreadinc.com and let us know what you need. 

If you're not ready to buy just yet then feel free to Request a Free 30-day Trial instead.

NOTE: This offer cannot be combined with any other offers or pricing programs, including GSA, Educational Institution and Not-for-Profit programs.  Additionally, this offer is only good for direct purchases from BlueThread Technologies.

We kind of always expected that a BLOB-free content database would be quicker to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, especially considering there is some "BLOB consolidation" that happens as a result of prepping the content database for SQL RBS compatibility.  It's actually pretty easy to see why it's so much faster...the upgrade process is moving BLOB references (< 100 bytes each) around instead of the actual BLOBs.  We've run all kinds of tests with different databases, in different enviroments and configurations and the results are kind of shocking. Every scenario we've tested shows that a BLOB-free content database upgrades about 20 times (2000%) faster than one that is BLOBBED-down. 

One of the bigger content databases we tested, with a lot of document versions, took just under 9 hours to upgrade with the BLOBs in the content database and just under 20 minutes without (2700% faster).  That's significant in several ways.  You can seriously consider an in-place upgrade and have the ability to run it several times in a scheduled maintenance window should you run into any issues.  It really makes the entire process considerably more forgiving.

The process from a StoragePoint perspective is really pretty simple:

1. Implement our 2007 product with WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007
2. Externalize existing BLOBs
3. Upgrade SharePoint
4. Upgrade StoragePoint (You'll need our 2010 Beta...send an email to info@bluethreadinc.com and ask for it)
5. Migrate from EBS to RBS (optional).  Existing EBS profiles can run side-by-side with new RBS profiles, so there is no immediate requirement to migrate them.

Request a Free Trial of StoragePoint and try it yourself.  Please let us know what your results are.

Everybody knows that SharePoint natively stores content (i.e. Office documents, PDFs, etc.) in SQL Server.  Everybody also knows that SQL Server databases typically reside on some of the most expensive disk in an organization’s storage infrastructure.  These realities, along with a long list of planning and manageability challenges, prevent a majority of companies from storing large volumes of content in SharePoint, in turn preventing them from realizing the full value of their SharePoint investments.

• They have to think twice before moving the content in all those file shares into SharePoint.
• That Notes to SharePoint migration will have to wait.
• Can’t even consider migrating all that content from legacy content management platforms into SharePoint.

We understand that all your content stored on Tier 1 storage is not sustainable.  We also understand that you don’t want to plan for and manage your content in 100GB chunks or risk falling outside of operational windows on disaster recovery and indexing tasks.  We understand all the challenges SharePoint Admins and SQL DBAs face with content BLOBs stored in SQL databases and that’s why we built the 1st version of StoragePoint over 2 years ago.  This is not an archive solution.  StoragePoint is an active storage solution.  The content never gets into SQL Server with StoragePoint in place, so you don't have to worry about table fragmentation in SQL or regularly running dbshrink operations to reclaim unused space.  Content is immediately relocated to the configured storage end-point.  And you can define as many end-points, to as many different storage platforms, as you like.  So you can put your mission-critical content on high availability storage and push everything else to a less expensive on-premise or cloud storage tier.  You decide based on your SLA and isolation requirements.

To help you decide we have developed the following tools:

• The BLOBulator will determine how much smaller your content databases can become once they are BLOB-free.
• Our Silverlight-based ROI Calculator will tell you how much money you can save in acquisition and monthly operational costs if you move BLOBs to less expensive tiers of Storage.
• You can also request a Free 30 Day Trial of StoragePoint.  You’ll have it installed and configured in minutes

We also have a StoragePoint for SharePoint 2010 Beta, which supports both SharePoint EBS and SQL RBS.  If you are interested in testing the Beta please contact our Support department.

We've been promoting Cloud storage as a way to help organizations save time and money storing some, if not all, their SharePoint content BLOBs.  There are savings on the front-end in not having to acquire storage infrastructure and supporting replication and disaster recovery solutions.  The savings can also pile up month-to-month because you don't have on-going care and feeding to worry about. 

From a SharePoint BLOB storage perspective the only real cost to store the BLOBs to a Cloud storage platform is a solution to externalize/move/relocate the BLOBs from SQL database(s) and any month-to-month usage costs (i.e. storage and bandwidth).  We have a Tiered Storage ROI Calculator (requires Silverlight) that can help you estimate what the cost savings and ROI with the cost of StoragePoint factored in.

Well, we've decided to save organizations even more on Cloud storage.  For a limited time we are offering up our Windows Azure BLOB Storage Adapter at no cost.  That's a savings of $4,995 per production SharePoint server and $895 per non-production SharePoint server.  To get started...

Request a free 30 day trial: http://www.storagepoint.com/product.aspx?tab=4

Request a quote: http://www.storagepoint.com/requestquote.aspx?DC=CLOUDFREE or navigate to http://www.storagepoint.com/requestquote.aspx and enter CLOUDFREE into he Discount Code box.  Make sure to check Windows Azure Adapter in the Optional StoragePoint Adapters list.

Promotion Rules

• Promotion ends March 31st, 2010
• You will receive one free Azure adapter license for each production and non-production core license you purchase.
• Offer cannot be combined with any other offers or discounts.
• Not valid with special pricing programs, including Educational, Not-for-Profit, and Government (i.e. GSA).
• For direct purchases only.  This promotion is not being offered through resellers or distributors.

NOTE: We do not sell non-production licenses without the purchase of at least 1 production license. The promotional discount will not be applied to any Software Support and Maintenance fees quoted/purchased. Those fees will be calculated on the retail list price of all software licenses purchased.

Here's a quick video on how StoragePoint puts SharePoint content BLOBs to the Azure Cloud: 

The StoragePoint Product Team is pleased to announce the release of StoragePoint 2.2.  The release adds several new features to the product including:

• File size and type filters on storage profiles.  You can control what files are externalized/not externalized based on the file size or type (i.e. DOCX, PDF, WMV, etc.).

• Improved orphaned BLOB garbage collection.  Orphaned BLOBs are tracked and purged from the system based on the BLOB retention policy you establish per profile.

• File shred support on the FileSystem adapter.  Turning this feature on will cause the adapter to perform a series of steps to ensure that deleted files are not recoverable.

• Windows Azure BLOB Storage support.  The Azure adapter is no longer Beta and is available for purchase.

• Extended StoragePoint API support.  The API documentation is available on the Support Portal under Downloads > StoragePoint > 2.2 > Documentation

We have also released an updated StoragePoint for SharePoint 2010 Beta.  If you are interested in testing the Beta please contact our Support department.

You can request a 30 day trial of StoragePoint along with any of the on-premise or cloud storage adapters at http://www.storagepoint.com/product.aspx?tab=4.

Click Here to load the ROI Calculator

While there are a number of ways to calculate ROI when implementing StoragePoint, we thought we'd focus on the simplest and most easily measurable factor:  Cost of Storage.

Storage costs make up a large percentage of an IT Budget both in the acquisition and ongoing maintenance.  SharePoint stores all of its content within a SQL database which can put a big dent into the budget since SQL clusters typically use some of the most expensive disk in an organization's storage infrastructure.  This cost is increased when you figure in the cost of a DBA that is now managing the content that could otherwise exist in a folder on a network.  These costs are all quite measurable and therefore make calculating ROI an easy exercise. 

The StoragePoint ROI calculator is based on the premise that moving data off tier one storage will save money in both acquisition and monthly operating costs.  In many cases this can result in StoragePoint paying for itself almost immediately. There are several other factors that are not accounted for in this calculator that can reduce your overall cost.  They include data compression (StoragePoint feature), de-duplication (if supported by the BLOB store hardware), maintenance task simplification, and performance gains. 

How much you can save?

To get started you'll need to know a few things.  You'll need to know the number of SharePoint web front end servers and your total storage.  This can be provided by our BLOBulator tool.  The BLOBulator can safely be run on any of your SharePoint servers and it will calculate the amount of storage that can be relocated as well as the required number of StoragePoint licenses.  Click the "Calculate ROI" button after running the tool to open the ROI calculator. 

You'll also need to have an idea of how much it costs to buy storage as well as operate on a monthly cost per GB for each storage tier you want to utilize.  One other thing to note is that we assume that 100% of storage is in tier one when calculating the costs without StoragePoint so it's important to get a good estimate of your monthly operating costs here.  This should include DBA costs as well.  We've included default values that were based on several conversations with our clients and storage vendors that you can use as a starting point.

Once you have your costs entered into the tiers you can then allocate a percentage of the total storage to different tiers.  When all of the storage has been allocated the calculator will display the results.  The "Show Graphs" button will provide a report view and also some quick edit options so you can allocate more or less storage to a tier and see how it affects your monthly savings. 

Check out the video for more information…

Click Here to load the ROI Calculator

Question: When will a SharePoint 2010 compatible version of StoragePoint be available?

Answer: We will make a Beta 1 of StoragePoint 2010 available to a limited number of participants starting November 30th.  First preference will be given to existing customers and partners.  Please send an email to info@bluethreadinc.com If you would like to be considered for participation in our Beta program. 

Question: What functionality is available in Beta 1?

Answer: Beta 1 is based off our 2.1 product release and includes fully functional EBS and RBS providers and is compatible with all of our on-premise and cloud-based storage adapters.  It also includes the capability to migrate from EBS to RBS.

Question: When will a public Beta of StoragePoint 2010 be available?

Answer: A public Beta of StoragePoint 2010 will be available in March 2010 or sooner.

Question: Will I be able to upgrage from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 with StoragePoint in place?

Answer: Yes.  Once you've completed the SharePoint 2010 upgrade then you would simply install StoragePoint 2010 which will perform the necessary upgrade from StoragePoint 2.x bits.

Our marketing guy has been walking around the office for over a week now telling everybody that will listen that we have to do some kind of "Bucks for BLOBs" or "Stimulus Package" type discount to help folks with constrained budgets or no budget until 1/1/2010.  Because I like the premise and it shuts him up (...about this anyway) in the process, here you go.  It's officially called the "BlueThread Year-end Stimulus Discount", but you can call it whatever you want.  Here are the details:

Effective Immediately, any StoragePoint order placed between NOW and 1/15/2010 will receive a 50% promotional discount on the retail list price of any software licenses purchased.  Please note that we do not sell non-production licenses without the purchase of at least 1 production license.  The promotional discount will not be applied to any Software Support and Maintenance fees purchased.  Those fees will be calculated on the retail list price of the software licenses purchased.

Click HERE To request a no obligation quote with this special discount or contact us at info@bluethreadinc.com and let us know what you need. 

If you're not ready to buy just yet then feel free to Request a Free 30-day Trial instead.

NOTE: This offer cannot be combined with any other offers or pricing programs, including GSA, Educational Institution and Not-for-Profit programs.  Additionally, this offer is only good for direct purchases from BlueThread Technologies.