The Metalogix StoragePoint team is pleased to announce the 3rd major release of our SharePoint Storage Management solution.  This version marks a substantial upgrade in SharePoint storage management functionality over our own V2 releases and the BLOB Offloading, archiving, and appliance solutions on the market today.  The tiered storage and hierarchical storage management (HSM) capabilities alone give SharePoint customers a very compelling reason (i.e. “Storage Economics”) to move all their content in SharePoint.  Combine that with Metalogix’s expanding suite of migration tools and a SharePoint customer can confidently move their content from expensive, but most often underutilized legacy content management platforms and unmanaged content sources like fileshares to SharePoint. 

Chris Geier, StoragePoint Product Manager, and I talking about how StoragePoint is "blazing a new trail" in SharePoint Storage Management.

StoragePoint is much more than the entry level BLOB offloading solutions out there.  It doesn't break SharePoint or bust your IT budget like the big box archiving solutions out there with their legacy and unsupported stubbing methods.  And it doesn't present the ongoing support and maintenance challenges associated with hardware, especially hardware from a startup that hasn't established whether or not it's a viable business.  Don't take my word for it...consult our own SharePoint Storage Management Mystical Square.  The "Square" is obviously our own creation and we think it's a pretty fair assessment of the space, but you can obviously decide for yourself.

Storagepoint.com has also been updated with new content, so please check it out for more information.  We'll be pushing out additional content and making some other announcements in the coming days and weeks, so stay tuned.

You can register to attend a live overview presentation and demo of StoragePoint 3.0 every Thursday at 11:00am Eastern.  Ping us at info@storagepoint.com if you want to request a demo/presentation for another day or time.

You can also view recorded 3.0 demos on our YouTube Channel:

• SharePoint Version 3 Installation and Configuration
• StoragePoint Version 3 Basic Introduction
• StoragePoint 3.0 Archiving Functionality

Mark Brazeau (...the guy that started BlueThread with me almost 4 years ago) and the one who runs the StoragePoint business unit here at Metalogix got a new toy (...never seen anybody so excited about a camera before) early last week and wanted to try it out.  He's been wanting to get me and Chris on camera talking about our offering and how we see things for a while now and while I've been open to the idea the opportunity didn't present itself until last week when Chris was in town from Chicago...cue Mark and his new camera.  The result was some very lightly staged, but completely unscripted talk between Chris and I about what we do and how we do it. 

We do get into our thinking and approach more than most ISVs would, so some that view these will ultimately proclaim, "What are they thinking?". One of our sales guys saw a couple of these clips yesterday and wondered "is it wise to publish our playbook", to which I replied "you can have the other team's playbook, but if you don't have the talent to execute it then it's just a book full of meaningless X's and O's".  Another asked why we were giving up the secret sauce, to which I replied "everyone knows it's Thousand Island Dressing".  I firmly believe that the StoragePoint wanna-be's out there don't have teams good enough to execute our playbook and/or can't mix-up a good batch of the secret sauce even if they had the recipe...I can make a mean New York style pizza and can give you the recipe for that, but if you don't use San Marzano tomatoes in the sauce and you don't take enough time to knead the dough or let it proof then it's not going to be good.  It would be like replacing .NET with Java or Focus with "We've got an App for that"...it's not going to be good eats. Besides, these other guys have all used creative means to get access to our bits and copy-cat our features. Some have even gone as far as copying content from our website, verbatim, to their own.  We can spend a bunch of time trying to stop them from copying and stealing from us or we can spend that time earning the innovation award we got at SPC09...making sure they are always at least one reverse-engineered release behind us.  When y'all see StoragePoint 3.0 next Monday it will be clear where we're investing our time.

So onto the videos...

We loaded the videos into a playlist on YouTube.  You can view the playlist here: http://bit.ly/at5W5I

You can play the entire playlist starting with the 1st video here: http://bit.ly/9uNM9k

StoragePoint 3.0 Information

• Contact us at info@storagepoint.com if you have any questions or would like to request access to the Release Candidate.  We will not issue pre-release trials without full corporate contact information (Name, Title, Company, Address, Phone Number, and Email Address).
• Attend one of our weekly StoragePoint 3.0 Overview sessions.
• Follow us on Twitter for updates on new content (videos, whitepapers, blogs, etc.).
• Find us on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/StoragePoint
• Check storagepoint.com on June 14th for our new site.

We've heard stuff like the following over the past few months (...with increasing frequency as we approach the RTM of SharePoint 2010):

"SharePoint will do BLOB remoting OOB with 2010 so there is no need for a StoragePoint-like solution."

"SharePoint 2010 on top of SQL 2008 will do what StoragePoint does."

"BLOB Remoting is or will become commoditized, so there's no need to pay for it."

Some of these are just plain inaccurate.  There is no OOB BLOB Remoting capability in SharePoint 2010...I've looked for it, can't find it.  There are two provider interfaces, EBS and RBS, that you can plug a solution into, but that's it.  The closest you can come to an OOB solution is the RBS FILESTREAM provider.  It's a stretch to call this OOB.  And not because it's a separate install.  And not because it's a pain to implement.  It's a stretch to call it OOB because it doesn't do an awful lot...it's at best an entry level solution.

It doesn't provide you with the capability to save much money on storage (...BLOB store needs to be local to SQL), make your BLOB store smaller (...no compression), make your BLOB store more secure (...no encryption), or make your SharePoint implementation faster.

So if you're not going to derive much benefit from implementing it then why would Microsoft create it?  The answer is quite simple.  It's there for all the folks running WSS 3.0 with the WIDE (Windows Internal Database Engine) option.  It's there so these folks can upgrade to SFS (SharePoint Foundation Server) and use SQL Express 2008 and stay within it's per-instance limits.  For reference, SQL 2008 R2 Express has a per-instance limit of 10GB...pretty good, but there are plenty of folks out there with WSS 3/WIDE that have a lot more than that.  And I'm not trying to suspend reality in order to sell you some unnecessary 3rd party solution.  I'd go away quietly (...not normally a trait attributable to me), embarrassed that we built something that didn't need to be built, if that was the case.  We happen to see a lot of value in our solution...value that customers have, are, and will continue to pay for.

And you know what, you don't take my word for it because there are plenty of articles and blog posts out there on this topic:

From Jie Li, Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint Team in Redmond: http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2010/03/24/faq-sharepoint-2010-remote-blob-storage-rbs.aspx or http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/12/07/sharepoint-2010-beta-with-filestream-rbs-provider.aspx

From TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663474(office.14).aspx or http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748607(office.14).aspx

I hate the fact that we have to create StoragePoint vs. RBS FILESTREAM Provider position papers or I have to waste time on blog posts like this.  Why are solutions so quickly dismissed if there is a real or perceived OOB capability in an upcoming SharePoint release?  Why is it assumed that this new capability will magically meet the needs of every SharePoint customer out there?  Is SharePoint and the highly energized community that orbits it "one size fits all"?  The answer is most definitively NO!  And that's a good thing.  I'm reasonably confident that most of us wouldn't be doing what we're doing today if it was.

I'd like to suggest a compromise on this point.  We'll stay away from the WSS 3.0/WIDE upgrade business if it's not assumed that the RBS FILESTREAM Provider provides the same value across a wide array of industries and customer sizes as StoragePoint does.  Seems like a fair (...and obvious) compromise. 

As always, please feel free to leave a comment or email me directly at rdoria@metalogix.net if you think I'm wrong or misleading folks.  Maybe we could debate the topic at a SharePoint Saturday or other event in the future.

The StoragePoint product team is pleased to announce that its highly-anticipated 3.0 release will RTM on June 15th.  The release builds on our award-winning 2.0 product with a long list of enterprise class features.  The release will include an intelligent archiving module, extensive Powershell support, more monitoring and reporting, and intelligent endpoint management to name a few.  Existing StoragePoint maintenance customers will be able to seemlessly upgrade for free to the 3.0 release.

This release will support both SharePoint 2007 (WSS and MOSS) and 2010 (SFS and MSS).

Stay tuned for more information on features and a schedule of pre-release webinars.

Ping us at info@storagepoint.com if you are interested in learning more or want to get early access to V3.  We are only making V3 available to a select group of customers and partners, so please be specific about your use case and provide full contact information in your request.  One of our technical pre-sales engineers will follow-up.

We wanted to create a video that highlighted the problem that StoragePoint solves, how we solve it, and what the experience of some of our customers has been.  I think this does a very good job of that...hopefully you will agree.  Enjoy and please share it with your associates, colleagues, customers, partners, friends, enemies, and members of your bowling team.