Attacking ‘The Blob' in SharePoint 2010

Study: StorSimple compression improves SharePoint capacity

Microsoft’s SharePoint has become an increasingly popular collaboration tool in the workplace but users can quickly hit a 200 gigabyte (GB) wall in the amount of documents they can store, when they really need room to store a “Blob” of material. But compression technology from a company called StorSimple cuts that blob down to size, according to a reports posted online by the company.

StorSimple’s SharePoint Database Optimizer was configured on (not "is included in" as I wrote earlier) SharePoint Server 2010 and is based on technology called Remote BLOB Storage (RBS). Besides being the title of the late Steve McQueen’s 1958 first starring film role in “The Blob,” BLOB stands for “binary large object,” which I take it to be fined as huge piles of unstructured data such as rich-media videos, audio, PowerPoint decks and the like, that would be shared and edited among people collaborating within SharePoint. The problem is that as SharePoint Server 2010 files pile up in SQL Server 2008 R2, for instance, so do the worries of SharePoint administrators. Microsoft recommends that customers limit the size of their databases to 100 GB – 200 GB, according to a white paper from StorSimple. because as data piles up, SharePoint performance slows. Also, that database limitation results in administrators creating multiple databases, which becomes obviously unwieldy.

Those drawbacks can limit the ability of SharePoint to compete with enterprise document management (ECM) solutions from such companies as Documentum.

RBS technology, such as StorSimple’s, compresses data and stores it externally, including in a cloud, so it not only optimizes storage capacity, but increases backup and recovery time, according to the report. UPDATE: An alert reader points out that StorSimple is not the only company doing data compression using RBS. True enough, though as the story goes on, you'll see that some customers struggling with piles of data could benefit from discovering RBS.

With RBS enabled, a 100 GB database was compressed by 96.8 percent and a 1 terabyte (TB) database was scrunched by 98.9 percent. Likewise, the time it takes to backup and restore these databases decreased. The time to back up a 100 GB database shrank by 98.5 percent from 2,490 seconds to 38 seconds. That’s the difference between taking a week’s vacation and returning to find your database backed up and warming up your coffee in the break room. The time to back up a 1 TB database with RBS shrank by 99.3 percent to 27 seconds from 4,114 seconds. Similar performance improvements were reported for data recovery time and for the time it takes to rebuild file indexes, the report states.

StorSimple is used by Rockford Construction Co. in Grand Rapids, Mich., a general contractor whose data “blobs” grow with the complexity and regulation of the construction industry. Not only must blueprints, contracts and other construction documents be stored, clients are now demanding video recordings of various phases of the project as well as a final walk-through before completion, said Shawn Partridge, vice president of information technology for Rockford, in a podcast on StorSimple’s Web site. And all these files have to be kept for 10 years after completion of a project.

Rockford noticed SharePoint started to slow down as the amount of data topped 300 GB until it deployed StorSimple’s RBS system. Before RBS, the company’s iSCSI storage area network was reaching capacity, but with RBS, “We were able to buy some time on that … because we are compressing and de-duping that data and storing the non-relevant data in the cloud,” Partridge said.

And because SharePoint is back to running better, “we’re saving time for all our employees,” he said.

• Microsoft
• Cloud Computing
• SharePoint Server
• SQL Server; StorSimplel enterprise document management