Wortell en Metalogix hebben inmiddels geruime tijd een partnership. Wortell zet de verschillende Metalogix producten in voor haar SharePoint migraties. Daarbij gaat het met name om migraties naar SharePoint 2010 vanaf SharePoint 2003 of 2007.
StoragePoint is een product waarmee data in SharePoint kan worden opgeslagen buiten de SharePoint SQL Server database. Het gaat daarbij om documenten. Deze gegevens worden opgeslagen op een File System en niet meer in de SQL Server database. Naast het opslaan van documenten op een File System is het echter ook mogelijk de documenten naar cloud oplossingen te verplaatsen zoals Windows Azure.
Grofweg werkt het model als volgt:
In SharePoint 2010 is het tevens mogelijk om documenten in de vorm van Blobs op te slaan op een filesystem. Er zijn echter enkele grote verschillen tussen de mogelijkheden van StoragePoint en de standaard SharePoint 2010 functionaliteiten. Hieronder een uittreksel uit het StoragePoint blog over SharePoint 2010:
You don't need a StoragePoint-like solution with 2010, it will do this OOB.
False: I could give that a partially true, but then I'd be giving credibility to the notion that the RBS FILESTREAM Provider is a viable solution for most enterprises. I firmly believe that it's not and not because I want you to suspend reality and buy our stuff no matter what. I believe that it's not viable because it was not designed, architected or built to address the needs that StoragePoint addresses. It was built to provide a free upgrade path for companies that implemented WSS 3.0 using the WIDE (Windows Internal Database Engine) option. There is no WIDE option for SharePoint Foundation Server, so the only free upgrade is SQL Express which has a 4GB database size limit. The RBS FILESTREAM Provider was built to give these customers a way to remote the BLOBs as they upgraded. Might not work for all of them, but it will work for most.
If you don't fit into the definition above (...WSS3/WIDE upgrade to 2010) then what's the benefit of this option? It's doesn't perform better than leaving the BLOBs in the database. You can't tier storage, or compress BLOBs, or encrypt them. And oh BTW, Microsoft isn't recommending this option for you. They've made the caveats pretty clear in presentations and blog posts that I've seen.
Metalogix heeft een persbericht uitgegeven over de overname:
Metalogix Acquires StoragePoint and dissolves SharePoint Scalability and Performance Boundaries
As you are one of the people we consider influential in the SharePoint community, we wanted to give you this advance notice of some significant news. Metalogix Software has acquired the StoragePoint product line from BlueThread Technologies. The official acquisition announcement will become public tomorrow morning, Monday, March 15th, but we are making this news available to you without embargo, so if you wish to make comment, you can write about it today.
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.
