Benchmark Test Results Show SharePoint Ready For Enterprise Content Management Scale

Whitepaper Details How SQL Server RBS with SharePoint 2010 and StorSimple Reduces Backup and Restore Times by 98 Percent

StorSimple announced that Microsoft has released results of a benchmark test that demonstrates how SharePoint 2010 can scale to one terabyte. A new whitepaper on SQL Server RBS with SharePoint 2010 and StorSimple shows the results of managing a one terabyte SharePoint content database against workloads that represent real-world scenarios. These scenarios were divided into 3 categories – (i) Upload, (ii) Full Transaction Mix and (iii) Backup/Restore, Migration and Search Crawl. The results showed dramatic performance improvements with a 98 percent reduction in backup and restore times, and a 75 percent reduction in index rebuild times.

SharePoint is Microsoft's fastest growing product ever. More and more end users are demanding to use SharePoint for all of their content such as Microsoft Office documents as well as large objects like CAD drawings, video and audio.

"With the increasing proliferation of large content objects like video, organizations face challenges managing the costs, complexity and performance of traditional storage and backup approaches," said Mark Gilbert, Gartner research VP. "Enterprise content management leaders need to develop strategies for dealing with the ballooning volume of content and the number of applications built on collaborative content platforms. As companies look to cloud-based content management strategies, moving the storage aspect to the cloud may be a reasonable first step, letting them realize cost efficiencies while still maintaining strong control and configurability of the applications to suit the enterprise needs."

"SharePoint has been a great product for us since we managed 300 gigabytes (GB) of content, but there were several categories of content we could not let our users store in SharePoint, including CAD drawings and video, which are critical to day-to-day operations," said Shawn Partridge, vice president of information technology for Rockford Construction. "With StorSimple we are now able to let users collaborate on this content in SharePoint, and plan to double or triple the amount of SharePoint content over the next six months. The increased performance and unlimited usage of SharePoint has had a major impact of user satisfaction."

This growth in size resulting from increased usage and large objects poses a challenge for SharePoint administrators from the added burden of managing more content, larger databases, larger backups, all while trying to ensure a high level of performance and availability. Recommendations for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 are limits of 100 GB and 200 GB of content per database, respectively. A summary of the whitepaper results are as follows:

• Backup – 68 minutes to 27 seconds – a 99.3 percent reduction
• Restore – 68 minutes to 38 seconds – a 99.1 percent reduction
• Index Rebuild – 600 seconds to 146 seconds – a 75.7 percent reduction
• MySite Public – sub-second response time – a 46.4 percent reduction
• Large File – 2 GB upload – a 51.1 percent reduction

"We are very confident we can take this benchmark from 1 TB to 10 TB in one database," said Dr. Ian Howells, StorSimple CMO. "This has big implications for SharePoint, as it means it is ready for the scale required for full enterprise content management. Administrators no longer need to limit what content can be stored in SharePoint, prune old versions, empty recycle bins and rebalance databases. When you move from 200 GB to terabytes of content, BLOB externalization is just step one. You need a plan for intelligent volume management, volume group management, consistent backup and recovery of both database, temporary database log files as well as BLOB content. Deduplication, BlockRank and automatic tiering have a tremendous impact on performance for both typical transaction mixes as well as backup, restore and disaster recovery to the cloud – as the results show."

About StorSimple
StorSimple has developed an application-optimized hybrid [cloud] storage solution for Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Windows Files Services, Virtual Machines, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure that delivers consistent storage performance at scale, significantly simplifies data protection, and reduces cost by up to 90 percent compared to traditional enterprise storage used with these applications. StorSimple is based in Silicon Valley and is funded by Ignition Partners, Index Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Redpoint Ventures.

SOURCE: StorSimple