Reduce SharePoint Storage Costs With Remote BLOB Storage
We have entered the era of "big content" and there is no end in sight to the rapid growth of content. Analyst estimates have pegged the total amount of content in 2020 to blow past 40 zettabytes (ZB)—a figure that is difficult for even the most seasoned IT professional to wrap his head around. Because SharePoint has evolved into the content management platform of choice, a majority of this content will be stored, managed and organized within your SharePoint environment.
When it comes to SharePoint, myriad problems arise when you deal with growing content across multiple farms in multiple physical locations. How can you effectively and efficiently manage terabytes of business content? How do you prevent SharePoint sprawl from infecting your farms and bringing productivity to a standstill?
Case Study: Chalcroft Reduces SharePoint Storage By 98%
When Chalcroft, a construction company based in the United Kingdom, initially deployed SharePoint 2010, the company had no idea how quickly it would grow and how it would eventually end up consuming so much time, resources and valuable storage space.
What began as a deployment with less than one terabyte (TB) of content ballooned to 7 TB of content within a year and, within three years, the company had roughly 25 TB under management. Its SQL Server 2008 was under attack from this massive amount of content and the problem was only getting worse.
As a construction company, the content being uploaded into SharePoint consisted of very large files, such as blueprints and drawings, which consistently exceeded 10 MB.
"Architect drawings are big evil beasts," shared Claire Edgson, Group IT manager for Chalcroft. "The drawings were up to 50 MB and a particular building could have up to 200 different drawings. It did not take long for our SQL Server to feel the strain."
The amount of content managed in SharePoint grew even further when the company started uploading photos—more than 30,000 over two weekends—along with videos of construction sites, potential buildings and new and old projects. Due to regulations, Chalcroft had to keep much of this content for up to 12 years, meaning that it would not be going anywhere for a long time.
"It reached the point where our SQL Server told us, ‘No more,'" said Edgson. "Our SQL Server was unable to keep up and it was drastically affecting our SharePoint's performance. If we didn't do something, our SQL Server was never going to cope. We had reached the point where it stopped being feasible to use."
As Chalcroft investigated remote BLOB storage (RBS) technologies to offload content, they initially tried a third-party solution and quickly decided the product was not going to meet their needs. Edgson described the product as "leaving nasty bits" behind in their SQL Server and causing more problems. It was at this point that Edgson found Metalogix StoragePoint and she admitted that the product blew her away with its ability to solve the storage problem in minutes.
"StoragePoint is bizarrely easy to use," she said. "It's just point, click and go. It's really brilliant. I can't say enough good things about what it did for us. We were able to offload 98% of the content to different, less expensive tiers of storage."
With so much content offloaded with varying needs—some content needs to be accessed daily, some needs only to be viewed once a year—the company now employs 32 different storage locations and sets guidelines on storage.
"We have a massive storage and we're now able to move the content to different locations based on file type, size and need," explained Edgson. "The content drifts in and out of locations while it's completely hidden from everyone. There is so much work that we now are able to manage automatically."
"Our SQL Server was finally able to breathe and it made our SharePoint faster," she said. "But it was more than that—we saved so much on storage costs. I would estimate that what we saved is easily three times what the solution cost."
Edgson said she was able to quadruple storage space, compared to storing everything within SQL Server, while also saving roughly £25,000 per year.
"I spent one-tenth on storage this past year compared to what I would have otherwise," she stated.
In addition, the company also installed restore manager product to assist with SharePoint backup and restore requests, which proved its worth with one particularly important moment of greatness.
"Our director was under a very tight deadline and had to recover an item within two hours that had been accidentally deleted. If I needed to do a fully recovery of the SQL database, it would have taken two days. But the backup had already occurred so it took us just 40 minutes to recover the document." "Let's just say he was slightly happy," she said, laughing.
Metalogix provides content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content. Today, more than 7,500 customers rely on the company's products to upgrade, migrate, organize, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms. Metalogix is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft's High Potential ISV Group and GSA provider.
For more information please call 202-609-9100 or visit www.metalogix.com.