What BLOB Externalization session were you sitting in?

The amount of misinformation (maybe distortions is a better way to put it) that we've heard post-SPC about the BLOB Externalization session on Wednesday (10/21) has been dizzying.  Our logo being left off a slide of vendors providing RBS solutions has somehow been translated into us not having a RBS provider.  The truth is we have a mature and fully-functional RBS provider and 2010 solution, much more so than the 5 vendors that made the slide.  <Sarcasm>Something to think about for the folks writing our epitaph; none of the five vendors that made it on that slide were on the Award slide presented during Jeff Teper's keynote.  And 2 of the 5 vendors on the RBS vendor slide make a pretty regular habit of trashing or marginalizing SharePoint, so the other 3 aren't exactly in good company.</Sarcasm>  And for those that don't believe anything unless they see it, you can see a fully functional demo of our 2010 solution on our YouTube channel (video embedded below).  No vaporware or developer art...100% working RBS provider, modeled after our EBS provider and able to leverage the same capabilities including all of our on-premise and cloud adapters.  We'll have a limited beta available next month and a full public beta available in Q1 2010.  So if Slide-gate wasn't enough, we've had customers and prospects come back and question whether or not they need our solution based on their belief that Microsoft is providing this capability OOB or they can easily build it themselves.  I've also heard customers quote a recommendation that they don't need to externalize BLOBs unless they're storing more than 5TB's of content in SharePoint. 

I have to admit to not making it to that session, but have since listened to a recording of the session multiple times and "StoragePoint logo missing from vendor slide" aside, I haven't heard anything to support the tweets during, blog posts after, or assertions made by partners and prospects during follow-up conservations.  I heard no promotion of an OOB solution...I heard a lot of guidance (and caveats) on the appropriate use of the RBS Filestream provider.  I heard the presenters clearly state that there is no magic volume of content for when you should consider BLOB externalization.  I didn't hear anybody promote the idea that IT shops should go off and build their own...again the opposite was stated pretty definitely.  So I'm scratching my head here...what session was everybody that we heard from in the Twitterverse and Blogosphere sitting in on?  Did people stick around for the Q&A or are they just regurgitating bullets off a PowerPoint slide?  I suppose people could have drawn some of these conclusions during the presentation portion of the session, but there were folks that asked very good questions at the end and got some very thoughtful answers from the presenters, Srini and Burzin.  The questions and answers reflected real world application of the technology in my opinion. 

I'm not going to carve up the video from the session and post it everywhere (not sure I can do that anyway without getting in trouble), but I will point out a few places on the timeline that I think support what we've been saying all along and turn the volume way down on all the post-session noise.  If you attended the SPC you can login to MySPC and watch the session online or download it and share it with your friends and co-workers.

• The Q&A session kicks in around 1h, 4m, 30s with a question about SQL mirroring and an assertion by the presenters that the RBS Filestream provider was built for internal use. 
• Around 1:06:00 there is a question (sounds like Russ Houberg, SharePoint MCM) about what's the recommended threshold for considering BLOB externalization...is it 5TB, 1TG, 500GB, etc?  Good back and forth on this one.
• At 1:09:50 there is a question effectively asking why you wouldn't externalize BLOBs if you owned SQL 2008 Enterprise? 
• At 1:11:38 someone asked if corp IT should try and build a provder themselves or rely on 3rd parties.  Response was a pretty definitive nod to 3rd parties...acknowledgement that development of these providers is not a trivial task.
• Around 1:12:45 more questions about RBS Filestream provider and where the files actually live.  The back and forth on this really highlighted one of the significant limitations of the "OOB" capability folks keep talking about.  Definitely worth a listen.

There's more, but those are the key points I want to call out.  I would encourage anyone to watch the whole thing, re-assess their position if they already have one, and make sure their tweets, blogs, and assertions match what was both presented and later discussed during Q&A.