Well How About That…

I have to say, I didn’t see this coming – but to be able to provide “cloud” storage as a transitive point during the migration does make sense. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the past few days it was announced that Metalogix was purchasing Blue Thread’s “StoragePoint” software. Storage Point was a “newer” yet well respected entrant in to the SharePoint COTS market. I’ve seen the software run and was very impressed by its ease of use and variety of storage options that exist (including Rackspace Cloud Storage).

Here is some content from their site:

“I’m sure you’ve already heard about StoragePoint’s amazing customer success stories and that it was the recipient of Microsoft’s Innovative SharePoint 2010 ISV Award at the SPC in Las Vegas.

Why the award? Until recently SharePoint has had a one-to-one relationship between the size of the content and the size of the content database.  Larger content databases push SharePoint boundaries and increase SharePoint disaster recovery, indexing,  and maintenance timeframes.  Also, the additional SQL I/O overhead created by the BLOBs necessitates fast hardware in the database tier.  If everything is in the SQL Server database then everything has to be stored on this high end hardware.  StoragePoint eradicates all of these challenges. You can now have 2+ Terabytes of content managed within a single 100GB content database!

StoragePoint accomplishes this dramatic change in SharePoint storage boundaries by leveraging the SharePoint EBS interface in SharePoint 2007 and both the EBS and SQL RBS APIs in SharePoint 2010.  StoragePoint takes all the existing BLOB content out of a customer’s SharePoint content databases and keeps new content from ever entering SQL Server in the first place.  The content could be remoted to the same tier of storage as SQL Server or it could be put on less expensive Tier 2 storage, Tier 3 storage, or even pushed up to the Cloud.  You can even cause different types and sizes of content to go to different tiers of storage.   No matter where you put it, you instantly get two benefits.   (1) Your content database size shrinks, making it more responsive, more manageable, and more reliable.  (2) In most cases your file access through SharePoint actually speeds up, especially when dealing with large files and bulk operations (i.e. Crawl).

SharePoint architects will ask, “How can my file access speed up when you’re taking the files out of the SharePoint database?”   Good question— and StoragePoint has a great answer:

There are two parts to this answer, the first being StoragePoint removing a step in the BLOB I/O workflow.  SharePoint natively breaks a document down into chunks on the WFE and sends it to SQL Server for processing where it is then written to the database file.  With EBS or RBS in place, documents are streamed from the WFE to the configured remote storage endpoint.  This form of I/O is much more efficient than the chunking that takes place between the WFEs and SQL Server. With StoragePoint you remove an I/O operation (SQL Server to Disk) and replace an inefficient I/O operation (BLOB Chunk from WFE to SQL Server) with a more efficient I/O operation (BLOB Stream from WFE to Storage Endpoint).  The other part of the answer has to do with the removal of all the BLOB I/O overhead from SQL Server.  SQL Server is left with more resources to manage relational data and transactions, so those types of operations will perform better and are significantly less likely to block…a common problem in many SharePoint implementations where you are dealing with large volumes of content or concurrent user counts. 

What’s even better, there’s absolutely no sacrifice to functionality or user experience…everything in SharePoint just works faster!. It’s also 100% .Net.

If you’re wondering how StoragePoint will work for you, just try it yourself.   Starting tomorrow, Monday, you will be able to check out the 30-day free trial of StoragePoint on the Metalogix web site, use it with your data and get rid of your SharePoint boundaries. You can even see “How low you can go” with the BLOBulator, a no cost downloadable utility on our site.  The BLOBulator will estimate the size of your SharePoint content database(s) as if you were using StoragePoint and  it doesn’t impact or harm your production system in any way.”

As more and more data gets shoved into SharePoint (pick your version) – there is going to be greater needs to be smarter about where that data gets stored.