Keep SharePoint Content BLOBs out of SQL

Everybody knows that SharePoint natively stores content (i.e. Office documents, PDFs, etc.) in SQL Server.  Everybody also knows that SQL Server databases typically reside on some of the most expensive disk in an organization’s storage infrastructure.  These realities, along with a long list of planning and manageability challenges, prevent a majority of companies from storing large volumes of content in SharePoint, in turn preventing them from realizing the full value of their SharePoint investments.

• They have to think twice before moving the content in all those file shares into SharePoint.
• That Notes to SharePoint migration will have to wait.
• Can’t even consider migrating all that content from legacy content management platforms into SharePoint.

We understand that all your content stored on Tier 1 storage is not sustainable.  We also understand that you don’t want to plan for and manage your content in 100GB chunks or risk falling outside of operational windows on disaster recovery and indexing tasks.  We understand all the challenges SharePoint Admins and SQL DBAs face with content BLOBs stored in SQL databases and that’s why we built the 1st version of StoragePoint over 2 years ago.  This is not an archive solution.  StoragePoint is an active storage solution.  The content never gets into SQL Server with StoragePoint in place, so you don't have to worry about table fragmentation in SQL or regularly running dbshrink operations to reclaim unused space.  Content is immediately relocated to the configured storage end-point.  And you can define as many end-points, to as many different storage platforms, as you like.  So you can put your mission-critical content on high availability storage and push everything else to a less expensive on-premise or cloud storage tier.  You decide based on your SLA and isolation requirements.

To help you decide we have developed the following tools:

• The BLOBulator will determine how much smaller your content databases can become once they are BLOB-free.
• Our Silverlight-based ROI Calculator will tell you how much money you can save in acquisition and monthly operational costs if you move BLOBs to less expensive tiers of Storage.
• You can also request a Free 30 Day Trial of StoragePoint.  You’ll have it installed and configured in minutes

We also have a StoragePoint for SharePoint 2010 Beta, which supports both SharePoint EBS and SQL RBS.  If you are interested in testing the Beta please contact our Support department.