Don't be afraid to Try It there's an undo button.

I think I've written about this before, so nobody reads my blog posts or I did a poor job of making my point.  Either way, we keep hearing from people that they're afraid to try StoragePoint.  The list of reasons is long and there isn't anything I can do about some of them (i.e. "We don't have a non-prod environment to test it in").  The majority of reasons revolve around one not wanting to munge their environment or not having the time to try it out.  I think we have a pretty good story in either case. 

Munge Insurance

On the do no harm side, StoragePoint ships with a Recall Timer Job.  Think of it as an undo button.  Running this job against a Storage Profile where content BLOBs have been externalized to some storage end-point will cause the content BLOBs to be recalled to the content database.  At that point you can uninstall StoragePoint and pretend it never happened.  We also strongly recommend that you backup your content database(s) before externalizing BLOBs, not because we're worried (...we've never lost a BLOB) but because it's one of those best practices things that give everyone next to us and above us in the food chain a warm and fuzzy.  We also recommend that you Test in a Test environment, not your production environment.  Some of you are saying "that's obvious" and some of you are saying "that's obvious, but needed to be said anyway".  Here's a little video that shows how the Recall job works (...also shows the Externalize job):

No Time...No Worries

We really wanted to ship V2 of StoragePoint in the Spring instead of the Summer, but we had this crazy design goal: Someone (...including salespeople and marketing folks) had to be able to download, install, activate, and do a basic configuration of StoragePoint in 10 minutes or less.  I can do it in 4-5 minutes, but I've probably done it no less than 200-300 times, so I can do it blind-folded...feel free to try and beat it.  You can obviously spend days making sure everything works, but this is not some huge time investment with all kinds of hurdles, challenges, and in the end frustration.  Again, the majority of our V2 effort was making something that's pretty complex seem awfully simple...something we've been getting a lot of kudos for.  For the seeing is believing crowd, video evidence can be found on our YouTube can be found on our YouTube Channel or by just downloading it and giving it a try.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci