How low can you go?

The StoragePoint product team is pleased to announce the availability of the BLOBulator.  We get asked questions like “how much smaller will my content database really get” and  “how many StoragePoint licenses do I need” pretty much every day.  The former is hard to come by without taking a look under the covers and the latter is not as simple as “how many WFEs do you have?”.  With that in mind we decided to create a tool that would pretty accurately estimate how much smaller a potential customer’s database(s) would actually get and give them a definitive answer on the number of licenses they would need.

While it’s not a perfect tool, we took the Chesapeake Energy database referenced in this blog and ran the BLOBulator against it.  It was pretty darn close.  It estimated a final size of 2.83GB and a reduction of 98% versus 2.61GB and 98.1%.  Tests with other content databases we have laying around produced similarly close results.  In a couple cases is was spot on.

Regarding license counting, this is the definition for a server needing a StoragePoint license directly from our website:

StoragePoint is licensed by SharePoint Web Front-end. A Web Front-end is defined as any SharePoint server running the Windows SharePoint Services Web Application service. This would include single instance or load-balanced web front-ends, dedicated index servers, or any other server type running the aforementioned service.

The BLOBulator will add them up and report what it finds on the bottom of the window.  It even has a button right on the window to request a quote should the results compel you to immediately act…we surely hope they do.

Please do not fear the BLOBulator.  It is a simple utility that calls a couple SharePoint API methods and makes a few database queries, but nothing that will bring your system to its knees.  It shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes to run, even on a large Farm.  It also does not collect or transmit any data about your environment.  Just run it on one of your SharePoint servers and you will be good to go.

You can download the BLOBulator from:

http://www.storagepoint.com/downloads/blobulator.zip

Remember, this tool will not run on a server or workstation that is not running WSS or MOSS.