StoragePoint 101

We've had the product out there for almost 2 weeks now and I wanted to take a moment to address the most common misperceptions and questions we have heard.  These are in no particular order of frequency or level to which they irritate me.  The irritation comes in the form of so-called experts not really knowing what they are talking about and in the process do a disservice to the hard work and ingenuity of our team..."those who can do, those who can't critique those who do".

• Externalizing the content will break SharePoint - While there are solutions out there that archive SharePoint content (...a form of externalization) and break SharePoint when doing so, they are in no way comparable to StoragePoint.  StoragePoint can exteralize any SharePoint content during any point of its lifecycle.  And StoragePoint sits below the SharePoint object model so it does not break ANY OOB functionality.  Everything works...users can upload and download documents and create versions...externalized content can be crawled, indexed, and searched.  100% Wonky FREE!
• SharePoint 2010 will do what StoragePoint does out-of-the-box - A little disclosure here first.  I worked for K2 before the release of SharePoint 2007 and lived thru this already with all the hype and misinformation around WF and MOSS workflow.  We have seen nothing nor heard anything from the SharePoint product team that would indicate that a StoragePoint-like capability will be delivered OOB.  SharePoint 2010 will continue to support EBS and become RBS-aware, so you'll need to build a EBS or RBS solution yourself (not for the faint of heart) or purchase one from a 3rd party like us.
• The External BLOB Storage API (ISPExternalBinaryProvider) is not supported - FAIL!  The API is currently supported for WSS and MOSS 2007 and will continue to be supported for the 2010 editions.  If someone tells you otherwise please feel free to correct them yourself or encourage them to contact me and I will be happy to correct, errr educate, them.  We will additionally provide a RBS Provider with the 2010 edition of StoragePoint and customers can move between them seemlessly.  At most, a customer will have to run a simple SQL script, but our engineers are still going to try and eliminate that minimal requirement. 
• Externalizing the content will make SharePoint slower - The exact opposite is true.  While your mileage will vary because everbody's environment is different, you can expect SharePoint to be measurably (50%) to significantly (100-200%) faster with StoragePoint in place.  The dynamics behind this are pretty simple.  BLOB I/O in SQL is inefficient and the SQL tier is traditionally the most complicated and expensive tier of any architecture to scale out.  StoragePoint moves the BLOB I/O to the web tier which is more easily and economically scaled out.  At the same time a siginificant load is removed from SQL, freeing it up to execute queries and perform transactional I/O.
• There are other products out there like StoragePoint - We are not aware of any, which is not to say there aren't.  I just want to make the point that solutions that live outside of SharePoint and pull content out and replace the content blob with some kind of placeholder (usually some kind of HTML redirect) should in no way be compared to StoragePoint.  Aside from the "breaking" part articulated in the 1st point above, these solutions are not "active".  They do not act on the content in realtime like StoragePoint does, they rely on services or batch jobs to externalize content.
• I will not be able to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 with StoragePoint installed - Certainly a valid concern and one that shows people are thinking ahead to 2010 (...good news for all of us), but again no issues.  I think some combination of the entries above cover all this, but we're not doing anything with StoragePoint that will break an upgrade from 2007 to 2010 and both us and Microsoft will provide a means to migrate to RBS should they choose to do so.  And as one of my collegues pointed out, a customer will always be able to run a StoragePoint Recall job and put everything back in the content database before attempting any upgrade to 2010.  Not gonna need to do that, but people like insurance policies and we like giving customers and partners comfort.
• It sounds to good to be true so it can't be - Maybe I'm programmed different than most people, but I only think something sounds too good to be true if it does everything I need it to do and doesn't cost me any money.  While a lot of people are feeling StoragePoint will do everything they need it to do they are unfortunately going to have to pay for it.  We're funny that way.