Storing SharePoint Data to Increase Manageability

“It had to be 100 percent  .Net, no Java, and fit within Microsoft standards and use standard APIs. It had to be highly scalable, with a light footprint that actually made everything better. And we wanted customers to be able to download and install it in less than 30 minutes,” says Mark Brazeau, senior principal at StoragePoint, about the StoragePoint solution to storing SharePoint data. “We released it in July 2009 and it just took off like a rocket.”

“From a manageability perspective , not only are we making things easier in terms of  backup, but normally within SharePoint you manage everything within these 100GB content databases. Since we make content databases 98 percent smaller, you can now manage about 2.5TB in a single content database. It’s a huge difference.”      

Security is must-have with storage. “We not only externalize that content on a WORM [Write Once Ready Many]-compliant device, which is more secure, but when we externalize that content we heavy-encrypt it up to 256 AES and we compress that content, so you need less storage. We had one client that required 82 percent less storage.”          

“What we’re doing is only storing metadata in the content databases. And the BLOBs get stored in a file share. In this paradigm you can manage 2.5TB of content in a single content database. Rather than storing everything in pretty expensive tier 1 storage, you can store it in multiple tiers.”        

StoragePoint was recently acquired by Metalogix. “We had a lot of people sending us flowers but what was most important to us as a company was that they had the same core principles we do,” Brazeau says.       

BlueThread, which had been associated with StoragePoint, will continue to put out its enterprise-class ECM product, SmartDesk, which was not purchased by Metalogix.