BLOB Remoting Myth - SharePoint EBS and SQL RBS can't Co-exist

I've heard other vendors in the SharePoint storage space (i.e. BLOB Offloading, Archiving, and Appliances) claim that you can't run EBS and RBS at the same...I heard some folks from the self-proclaimed leader of all things SharePoint declare this a few days ago.  Those claims show a fundamental lack of understanding of how those technologies work and how they are implemented within the SharePoint OM.  Additionally, if you couldn't have them implemented simultaneously, how would you migrate from EBS to RBS once EBS is no longer supported (NOTE:  EBS is deprecated in SharePoint 2010)?  You going to take your farm down while you perform some complicated and long-running upgrade/migration process or worse internalize all the content that was externalized with EBS, unplug the EBS provider, start associating instances of an RBS provider with all your content DBs, and then externalize the content again?  Neither one of those options sound real appetizing or even viable, but that's what you're left with if you in fact can't run the two technologies side-by-side.

The fact of the matter is you can run them side-by-side.  The folks out there saying you can't do this simply do not know what they're talking about and to be perfectly frank there's a lot of that going around these days...and not just on this specific topic (...lot's of noise about how stuff works and how you should be scared of these technologies, but not a lot of facts to back it up...I feel a rant coming on, so I'll stop there).  The misstatements from folks that should know is at the same time amusing and frightening.  We get a quick laugh about it within our product team, but then you talk to a customer that is fearful about implementing the technology because they've been told there is no simple upgrade path or the vendor doesn't have a good answer and it's not funny any longer.

So here is our position on this topic: I can declare with absolute certainty that the two technologies can run side-by-side...we demonstrate this pretty much every day to somebody.  And as far as migrating from EBS to RBS, we've implemented a shallow copy migration capability into our 3.0 product.  So let's take the following scenario.  I'm customer X and I've implemented StoragePoint 2.2 in my MOSS 2007 farm and externalized all my content.  I'm now contemplating an upgrade to MSS 2010 and want to use RBS instead of EBS once I'm there because I'm concerned about the future supportability of EBS.  Here's how you would accomplish that with StoragePoint:

1. Upgrade from MOSS 2007 to MSS 2010
2. Upgrade from StoragePoint 2.2 to StoragePoint 3.0
3. At this point everything works and content is retrievable using EBS, which as previously noted is deprecated, but still supported, in 2010...DEPRECATED does not equal UNSUPPORTED.
4. Create Content DB scoped Storage Profile(s) in StoragePoint that "cover" the existing EBS profiles.  So if you have a bunch of site collection scoped EBS profiles, creating a Content DB scoped RBS profile will "cover" all the site collections within it.  If you have web application scoped EBS profiles, you would need to create a Content DB scoped RBS storage profile for each Content DB in the web application if you wanted to "cover" all the EBS-externalized content within that web application.
5. Run the Externalize job on the new Content DB scoped profiles.  A shallow copy migration between EBS and RBS will occur, transferring control of the externalized BLOBs to RBS.  Users can access the content while this is happening, no downtime has to be planned or incurred.
6. That's it!  No painful or long-running process.  No down-time.  No re-allocation of storage to account of content being internalized.

If you're looking at BLOB Remoting solutions and are concerned about 2007 to 2010 upgrades or future supportability ask the question..."how do you upgrade from 2007 to 2010?" and/or "how do I migrate from EBS to RBS?".  I would also encourage you to consider yourself a temporary resident of the fine state of Missouri and say "OK, SHOW ME!".  And with that in mind, I don't expect you to just take my written word for it, so we'll have a short video demo of this up on our YouTube Channel in the coming weeks...as we get closer to RTM of StoragePoint 3.0 on June 14th. 

StoragePoint 3.0 Information

• Contact us at info@storagepoint.com if you have any questions or would like to request access to the Release Candidate.  We will not issue pre-release trials without full corporate contact information (Name, Title, Company, Address, Phone Number, and Email Address).
• Attend one of our weekly StoragePoint 3.0 Overview sessions.
• Follow us on Twitter for updates on new content (videos, whitepapers, blogs, etc.).
• Find us on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/StoragePoint
• Check storagepoint.com on June 14th for our new site.