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

I want to show a quick example of how to use StoragePoint to externalize content to a DFS share.  Many companies use DFS to provide redundant storage space for the user community.  It’s proven itself to be a relatively solid technology for replication of data to multiple locations for redundancy and high availability.  Those qualities also make it an excellent choice for a BLOB store for StoragePoint.

Configuration

Configuration is quite easy as StoragePoint will treat a DFS Namespace just like a UNC path.  This can be used with the OOTB file system adapter.  I’ll be using four servers to illustrate this scenario.  Essentially we have two file servers that replicate data between them. This is where content BLOBs from SharePoint will be placed by StoragePoint.  Check out the diagram below for the details.

I’m not going to go into detail on configuring DFS as there are plenty of guides online that show how to do that.  You can find a few here:

·         Windows Server 2003 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727150.aspx  

·         Windows Server 2008 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732863(WS.10).aspx

·         DFS Terminology - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781375(WS.10).aspx

Make sure that the DFS path where BLOBs will be stored is only accessible by the SharePoint service account.  If this share is to be backed up (and it should if it is not replicated offsite) you will need to grant access to the backup service account as well. 

Once DFS is configured we can set up a storage profile to externalize content to the DFS Namespace.  The storage profile will use the standard StoragePoint FileSystem Adapter.  In the “Connection” box input the path to the DFS Share.  In my case it is “path=\\c611.com\dev1\DFSBLOBS”.  The compression and encryption are still valid options with DFS.  Choose them based on your own requirements.

And that's pretty much it for setting up StoragePoint to work with DFS.  For a demo you can check out the YouTube video below:

Benefits

The obvious benefit here is the fault tolerance that DFS provides.  Not everyone has a fully redundant SAN or NAS to store files, but now an organization can provide a level or redundancy for SharePoint that wasn't there before.  The not so obvious benefit is potentially eliminating the need for a backup of the BLOB store.  If DFS is replicating this information to a data center that is far enough away from the primary data center to account for scenarios such as flooding, forest fires, or meteor strikes then I could see removing the need to backup the BLOB store.  SharePoint is already handling the versioning (or it should be) so you do not need to worry about recovering a specific version of a specific file.  The only concern for recovery is to ensure that the DFS Namespace is available to the recovered site.

I can see another potential use for this, but I'll save that for another post and some more testing...If you can guess it you get a gold star...