The Throwdown results are in!

It has been a long day but the results are in!  Since the 1 million document bulk load test finished early (approximately 5 hours and 45 minutes) we decided to keep the test going.  We ran the test until we maxed out the test harness meter at a 250GB content database for the SharePoint instance NOT running StoragePoint.   The results overwhelmingly favor using StoragePoint in conjunction with your SharePoint implementation. Simply put, if you have SharePoint you should be running StoragePoint. 

There are some important things to note as you review the test results.  SharePoint running with StoragePoint is about 45% faster at insertion and retrieval of document library items with encryption and compression enabled.  The resulting size on disk of the compressed externalized content is 48GB (the uncompressed size is 334GB) which is an approximate compression ratio of 85.6%.  In essence StoragePoint increases the read’write performance of content BLOBs to SharePoint, reduces the SharePoint content database size, while providing a smaller footprint on disk and increased security through encryption.

To put things in perspective, running StoragePoint we successfully bulk loaded 1,615,982 files into SharePoint in just under 10 hours with the resulting SharePoint content database being 8.5GB.  The total disk spaced used was 56.5GB (334 GB compressed down to 48GB plus 8.5GB for SharePoint list metadata).  I am not sure we can provide evidence that is anymore compelling than that …

After approximately 10 hours of testing the results are as follows:

StoragePoint Features Enabled

• 256 bit AES Encryption
• File Compression
• File System Adapter

Disclaimer:  Your mileage will vary with compression and performance. While StoragePoint, in general, improves performance of SharePoint many factors impact compression and performance including file sizes, file types, file structure, and underlying server infrastructure.