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.

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.

I think I've written about this before, so nobody reads my blog posts or I did a poor job of making my point.  Either way, we keep hearing from people that they're afraid to try StoragePoint.  The list of reasons is long and there isn't anything I can do about some of them (i.e. "We don't have a non-prod environment to test it in").  The majority of reasons revolve around one not wanting to munge their environment or not having the time to try it out.  I think we have a pretty good story in either case. 

Munge Insurance

On the do no harm side, StoragePoint ships with a Recall Timer Job.  Think of it as an undo button.  Running this job against a Storage Profile where content BLOBs have been externalized to some storage end-point will cause the content BLOBs to be recalled to the content database.  At that point you can uninstall StoragePoint and pretend it never happened.  We also strongly recommend that you backup your content database(s) before externalizing BLOBs, not because we're worried (...we've never lost a BLOB) but because it's one of those best practices things that give everyone next to us and above us in the food chain a warm and fuzzy.  We also recommend that you Test in a Test environment, not your production environment.  Some of you are saying "that's obvious" and some of you are saying "that's obvious, but needed to be said anyway".  Here's a little video that shows how the Recall job works (...also shows the Externalize job):

No Time...No Worries

We really wanted to ship V2 of StoragePoint in the Spring instead of the Summer, but we had this crazy design goal: Someone (...including salespeople and marketing folks) had to be able to download, install, activate, and do a basic configuration of StoragePoint in 10 minutes or less.  I can do it in 4-5 minutes, but I've probably done it no less than 200-300 times, so I can do it blind-folded...feel free to try and beat it.  You can obviously spend days making sure everything works, but this is not some huge time investment with all kinds of hurdles, challenges, and in the end frustration.  Again, the majority of our V2 effort was making something that's pretty complex seem awfully simple...something we've been getting a lot of kudos for.  For the seeing is believing crowd, video evidence can be found on our YouTube can be found on our YouTube Channel or by just downloading it and giving it a try.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci

The amount of misinformation (maybe distortions is a better way to put it) that we've heard post-SPC about the BLOB Externalization session on Wednesday (10/21) has been dizzying.  Our logo being left off a slide of vendors providing RBS solutions has somehow been translated into us not having a RBS provider.  The truth is we have a mature and fully-functional RBS provider and 2010 solution, much more so than the 5 vendors that made the slide.  <Sarcasm>Something to think about for the folks writing our epitaph; none of the five vendors that made it on that slide were on the Award slide presented during Jeff Teper's keynote.  And 2 of the 5 vendors on the RBS vendor slide make a pretty regular habit of trashing or marginalizing SharePoint, so the other 3 aren't exactly in good company.</Sarcasm>  And for those that don't believe anything unless they see it, you can see a fully functional demo of our 2010 solution on our YouTube channel (video embedded below).  No vaporware or developer art...100% working RBS provider, modeled after our EBS provider and able to leverage the same capabilities including all of our on-premise and cloud adapters.  We'll have a limited beta available next month and a full public beta available in Q1 2010.  So if Slide-gate wasn't enough, we've had customers and prospects come back and question whether or not they need our solution based on their belief that Microsoft is providing this capability OOB or they can easily build it themselves.  I've also heard customers quote a recommendation that they don't need to externalize BLOBs unless they're storing more than 5TB's of content in SharePoint. 

I have to admit to not making it to that session, but have since listened to a recording of the session multiple times and "StoragePoint logo missing from vendor slide" aside, I haven't heard anything to support the tweets during, blog posts after, or assertions made by partners and prospects during follow-up conservations.  I heard no promotion of an OOB solution...I heard a lot of guidance (and caveats) on the appropriate use of the RBS Filestream provider.  I heard the presenters clearly state that there is no magic volume of content for when you should consider BLOB externalization.  I didn't hear anybody promote the idea that IT shops should go off and build their own...again the opposite was stated pretty definitely.  So I'm scratching my head here...what session was everybody that we heard from in the Twitterverse and Blogosphere sitting in on?  Did people stick around for the Q&A or are they just regurgitating bullets off a PowerPoint slide?  I suppose people could have drawn some of these conclusions during the presentation portion of the session, but there were folks that asked very good questions at the end and got some very thoughtful answers from the presenters, Srini and Burzin.  The questions and answers reflected real world application of the technology in my opinion. 

I'm not going to carve up the video from the session and post it everywhere (not sure I can do that anyway without getting in trouble), but I will point out a few places on the timeline that I think support what we've been saying all along and turn the volume way down on all the post-session noise.  If you attended the SPC you can login to MySPC and watch the session online or download it and share it with your friends and co-workers.

• The Q&A session kicks in around 1h, 4m, 30s with a question about SQL mirroring and an assertion by the presenters that the RBS Filestream provider was built for internal use. 
• Around 1:06:00 there is a question (sounds like Russ Houberg, SharePoint MCM) about what's the recommended threshold for considering BLOB externalization...is it 5TB, 1TG, 500GB, etc?  Good back and forth on this one.
• At 1:09:50 there is a question effectively asking why you wouldn't externalize BLOBs if you owned SQL 2008 Enterprise? 
• At 1:11:38 someone asked if corp IT should try and build a provder themselves or rely on 3rd parties.  Response was a pretty definitive nod to 3rd parties...acknowledgement that development of these providers is not a trivial task.
• Around 1:12:45 more questions about RBS Filestream provider and where the files actually live.  The back and forth on this really highlighted one of the significant limitations of the "OOB" capability folks keep talking about.  Definitely worth a listen.

There's more, but those are the key points I want to call out.  I would encourage anyone to watch the whole thing, re-assess their position if they already have one, and make sure their tweets, blogs, and assertions match what was both presented and later discussed during Q&A.