All Things Not Being Equal

Ok, we’re getting a lot of comparisons to (in no particular order) AvePoint, CommVault, Mimosa Systems, Metalogix, and a few others.  I have to say first and foremost that we are not positioning StoragePoint to be an archive solution.  You can certainly leverage it to archive content and it would do it better than the solutions outlined above (…they all do wonky stuff with HTML placeholders and redirects…breaks SharePoint…it’s not pretty).  StoragePoint is a solution that removes the content (active and/or archived) BLOBs from a SharePoint Content Database and places them in a external BLOB store that you define by Web Application, Site Collection, or Records Center.  And it does this in real-time so the content BLOBs are never actually stored in the content database.  This is another important distinction from the solutions we are commonly compared to.  Those solutions rely on services sitting outside of SharePoint to pull the content out of the content database after the fact which leads to table fragmentation and the need to continually shrink the content databases if you want to reclaim the unused BLOB space.  Our solution is active, so there is no table fragmentation or need to shrink the content databases to reclaim unused space…it is never used in the first place. 

In reality there are no solutions to compare with StoragePoint.  Believe me, I wish there was, competition is good.  Helps drive innovation and awareness.  Some of the ECM vendors out there, notably OpenText and EMC (Documentum), have built similar solutions, but they are there to facilitate their SharePoint co-existence strategies.  They use SharePoint as a facade or pass-thru for their content management repository.  SharePoint increasingly represents a ELE (sorry for the Deep Impact reference, but they are Dinosaurs) for these guys, so this is their somewhat lame attempt at survival.  So, they are not going to promote a solution that dramatically improves SharePoint’s manageability, scalability, and performance (...like StoragePoint does) because it would be at their own core offering’s expense.

And no, this capability will not be delivered OOB with the 2010 flavor of SharePoint.  You’ll need to build something using EBS or RBS or buy a solution like StoragePoint that will support both…or you can buy one of the aforementioned solutions that breaks SharePoint…or you can pay mega bucks for a OpenText, Documentum, or FileNet and just use SharePoint for window dressing.  That last option comes with a lot of burnt fingers, headaches, WTF? moments, and other unexpected surprises.  I laugh whenever I hear people bitch about SharePoint’s shortcomings.  It certainly has it’s share of surprises, burnt fingers, and headaches…but the difference is you have money (lots of it) left over to treat your wounds.