Blog
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15 May 2010
I read on a SharePoint blog a question of 'Pat'. She argued that SharePoint cannot be used as a complete Document Management System as SharePoint stores the documents in Blobs which are not accepted by European Firms for Certification, like in Germany the TÜV. The criteria is that all Archived Documents are to be stored on Media that cannot be modified later on. In other Words you have to store archived documents on WORM Storage.
The question is: Can Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and 2010 be WORM compliant?
Pat is correct, when she states that BLOB’s are not the place for archived content. Also a file system is not the place for an archive. We have the same rules in the Netherlands and we see them on all places in the World, that archived content must be under control by a device (WORM Write Once Read Many, CAS Content Addressed Storage) or software that protects the content for changes. Furthermore, the device or software should give you auditing possibilities when someone is trying to modify and access the archived content. Native SharePoint is not build for long time archiving, so you need the SharePoint Record Center function of SharePoint. By using SharePoint Record Center it gives you the possibility to archive content for a long time. By using EMC Centera, Caringo CAStor, HDS Hitachi Content Platform and DELL DX Object Store - which are all CAS systems - you can add the WORM functionality to SharePoint. As stated before, SharePoint 2007 or 2010 out-of-the-box does not connect to WORM storage, you need a special connector for this. STEALTH Content Store for SharePoint is such a connector.
So can Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and 2010 be WORM compliant? The answer is: YES
Want to learn more about how your SharePoint environment can be WORM compliant using STEALTH Software, please contact us.
Learn more about other extra capabilities your SharePoint gets when you use STEALTH Software Content Store to connect to external storage by reading this Capabilities Overview
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13 April 2010
Recently I bumped on a blog article that was two years old but seen the comments the discussion was still alive. The article was about the fact that Microsoft stored its SharePoint content in SQL Server with al its limitations like backup and restore issues and storing less important content on expensive storage, but with the EBS External Blob Store API Microsoft provided a way out. You could connect to an external storage but Microsft itself was not going to provide that. Their argument is that they are software company and not willing to take care of all the various hardware the external storage could run on. That was a challenge for either the hardware vendors or the software developers. Well, if you have been to our site before and now about STEALTH Software than you know the answer... Anyhow, the writer of the article was not amused with the EBS API as it did not solve the issue of storing less important content on expensive storage, "Not all content are equal!" as the writer points out. And that is true.
EBS External Blob Store
So with the EBS API it is possible to get rid off the SQL Server storage limitations, only you needed third party software like our STEALTH Content Store for SharePoint. This software will connect your SharePoint with an external Storage environment. This external storage platform can be based on private (cloud) storage software from Caringo CAStor, or Scality or if you prefer a public storage solution you can connect with Windows Azure, Amazon S3 and EMC Atmos. Opting for this storage infrastructure you are liberating your SharePoint platform from its SQL Server chains. When you upload content in SharePoint the STEALTH Software separates the metadata from the content (blob). The metadata are stored in SQL, the content goes in the external storage. This simple action has a major impact on SharePoint: performance is back at the level when you started with SharePoint, you can scale your SharePoint as much as you want to. If you want to put all your company content in SharePoint there is no barrier anymore that will hold you back. We have presented this 'revolutionary' infrastructure to companies who were struggling with their 200-300GB SQL storage. When management found out that they can finally make full use of SharePoint they decided to put all thier content in SharePoint creating a storage of several TB's. Which ofcourse for external storage environments is not a big thing. For SQL it would have been a big issue. One of the other results that our customers liked was the very fast backup and restore times. With only metadata in SQL backup and restore times are more minutes than hours this to big relief of the people who are responsible for backup and SLA's. Backup of content is not needed as the external storage environment automatically duplicates the content.
SharePoint 2010 presents RBS Remote Blob Store
With the arrival of SharePoint 2010 things become a little more fun, because with RBS STEALTH Content Store can actually direct content to different storage environments. Now, we are coming to the point what the writer of the article wanted so much. What EBS could not provide, RBS will. Say you want some content fast, than use a ParaScale or Bizanga Store environment, these guys have fast i/o's, if your collegue of Archive is more interested in retention periods than he/she can store the content in a CAStor storage environment where CAStor takes care that the item is stored safely for 7 years. And if you have content that is not business critical but valuable enough to keep why not store that in Windows Azure. As we encrypt all SharePoint content with AES Advanced Encryption Standard 256 bit you don't have to worry about security of public cloud storage, your content is already secured.
Bottomline of my story is that Microsoft indeed has not addressed the SQL storage issue with the arrival of SharePoint 2010, but there is a solution for it. And with RBS Remote Blob Store the solution just got better. A solution that will enable organizations to use SharePoint for the purpose that they got it in the first place. SharePoint (2010) is a worthy Enterprise Content Management system that users over the whole world love. It is actually bizarre that at the back-end SharePoint is 'being held hostage' by limited storage capabilities and where the main options are usually buy more expensive storage or preventing the upload of more content in SharePoint. I even heard of a situation at a big entreprise company that a mail was sent to users to delete content in order to lower the storage! Well, that is completely in line with the spirit of SharePoint...not! Using another (very expensive) content management system to be an add-on to SharePoint is actually also quite extraordinary, laying an unneccessary burden on the users (2 learning curves) and operational managers, not to mention the huge costs
There is a solution and it is actually not complex, but it requires guts to look at storage infrastructure in a different way, leaving the well-known traditional path. I have noticed also unbelieve: how can a storage infrastructure be let's say only 30% of what we usually pay for? Well, what can I say: Times have changed. SharePoint is taking over Content Management world and The 'Watercurtain' Storage infrastructure (or call it SharePoint Storage 2.0) will eventually replace the fileserver silo's. Life will be less complex and cheaper..what else do you want?
For a comparison between native SharePoint and STEALTH Software Content Store for SharePoint, check out the Comparison Overview
Download the presentation that gives you detailed insight how STEALTH Software Content Store works and how the SharePoint 2007 and 2010 content is stored in the various external storage and not in the SQL server.
Need more in-depth information? Please contact us!
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04 March 2010
Microsoft is positioning the new coming SharePoint as an Enterprise Content Management. Microsoft's mantra is 'everyone participates and all content is managed,' but how far is SharePoint indeed ready to be an Enterprise Content Management?
Not being the expert on SharePoint 2010 myself, I like to refer to an article that I read from Andrew Chapman who is the Senior Director of the SharePoint Technologies Group in EMC’s Content Management and Archiving division and I what I thought was very informative. He gives a walk through the content management-centric features of SharePoint 2010, and let's you see what works, and what areas need improvement according to his own opinion. You can read his article here.
My interest was to see how far can SharePoint 2010 develop as a central content hub for an organization. More and more content is being created so a central place where you can easily find all aspects of your stored content and create an easy accessible knowledge base is becoming more and more important.
Andrew Chapman refers to this in his article: 'SharePoint 2010 does address some issues related to how to handle large volumes of data – the removal of some list size limitations and support for remote BLOB storage providers in SQL Server for example. However, rather than focusing primarily on the back-end scalability of the system it seems that Microsoft took a more user-centric approach to this challenge.' He mentions that Microsoft does not focus on the back-end scalability, but Microsoft does not have to as companies like us take care of that. If you want to read more about our SharePoint scalability solutions, please read this.
Always good to hear what others think of SharePoint 2010 being positioned as an Enterprise Content Management, so feel free to comment.
Download information on our STEALTH SharePoint Storage Guide, visit our Knowledge Center.
Need more in-depth information? Please contact us!
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23 February 2010
This weekend I read an article by Rachel Lebeaux who wrote an article on Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans. She referred to the big problems that Wordpress.com – a leading worldwide blogging platform - experienced last Thursday. For a full 110 minutes (nearly two hours!) the whole Wordpress blogging platform was down. This meant that 10,2 million personal and business blogs were down. An estimated 5,5 million page views were lost. The reason according to the official Wordpress.com blog was: “...but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.”
It makes clear that Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are more than some abstract articles in some legal paper. Or as Abe Wachsman, senior vice president of IT at Atlantis Health Plan Inc. put it in an interview on searchcio.com: ...is not that we are doing business continuity and disaster recovery to satisfy some abstract requirement," Wachsman said. "We are doing this to ensure that we can continue to exist as a business, because the business has value."
Taking this information and put it in the perspective of your SharePoint or Zimbra environment, what for impact will it have on your organization, or the organization of your client if a minor or major ‘disaster’ hits SharePoint’s SQL Server or the fileservers of Zimbra? Of course you have got backup procedures in place, but how sure are you that all tapes are in place? Missing one tape or one tape being defective indicates loss of data, maybe irreplaceable loss of valuable data. And how about restore times? If your content storage has taken up sizable proportions it might take multiple hours or even days to have all content restored. What are these implications on the organization? Your company or your client not being able to access its valuable data and content because backup tapes are busy restoring. What are the costs of such a situation? And how can you best minimize the risk of such a situation?
In general Disaster Recovery is seen as something that is part of a SLA, something legal. So how do you get budget for something ‘hypothetical’? Well, don’t talk about Disaster Recovery, talk about Business Continuity. Storing your content in an external storage (or private cloud storage if you like to use that word) will dismiss your need to ‘recover’ as all the stored content is automatically copied in the storage space. So to ensure that Business Continuity is not at stake is to take measures that will support Business Continuity: to migrate your data to a new storage infrastructure. An infrastructure that will automatically will tackle the backup and restore issue, whilst your mission will be saving costs on storage and maintenance and improving performance of business processes. A nice piggyback ride.
Neither SharePoint nor Zimbra offer an Out of the Box connection to an external storage platform. STEALTH Content Store can do the trick for you. As STEALTH Content Store connects with different kinds of external storage platforms like Caringo CAStor, ParaScale, Windows Azure, EMC Atmos and Amazon S3, you have full freedom of choice what kind of external storage infrastructure you would like to adopt.
If the backup and recovery of your company’s SharePoint or Zimbra content is high on your list, why not give us a call or contact us via our site. We can discuss your matter and offer you solutions that fit your business situation the best.
Feel free to comment and give me your views on this matter.
Download information on our STEALTH SharePoint Storage Guide, visit our Knowledge Center.
Don't forget to join our Newsletter - always informative, usually provocative.
