INFRASTRUCTURE

Microsoft SharePoint was first launched in 2001, targeting simple collaboration through top-down portals, search and document management. Four major release later it has become the collaboration and workflow platform of choice for almost 90% of enterprise and government agencies. The number of users has risen to more than 500 million users globally over the last ten years and is further increasing. The SharePoint environments have not only become substantially larger in terms of data volume but are now both mission and business critical for an overwhelming number of organizations.

As the importance of SharePoint increased, requirements such as scalability, performance, security, compliance and business continuity had to be met. Service Level Agreements became more stringent. The traditional SQL/SAN architectures are management overhead intensive and in most cases have become cost prohibitive. For some time, organizations have been looking for way to address the ever growing requirements while keeping management overhead and cost under control. It is estimated that more than 90% of companies still run SharePoint using a traditional SQL/SAN environment.

STEALTH Software set out to develop a software-only solution to address all major infrastructure requirements: scalability, improvement of performance in the SQL environment, security, lower cost and lower management overhead for SQL and storage and, built in content failover for business continuity and disaster recovery requirements.

STEALTH Software has developed a software-only solution from the ground up. It is deployed on the existing SharePoint servers and does not required any additional hardware or software. Web parts and stubbing is not necessary to run the software. It is non-intrusive to the user or to the SharePoint infrastructure and conforms with Microsoft standards. The benefits include:

• Reduction of the SQL environment by 80% or more, by off-loading unstructured data straight to external storage and, as a result, the reduction of high performance SAN/NAS storage by 80%.
• Ability to deploy vendor and platform independent storage that is substantially more cost effective than high performance SAN/NAS storage. Typically up to 30% cost reduction is achieved by deploying STEALTH Content Store.
• Greatly reduced management overhead in both SQL and Storage.
• Built in security of data “in flight” and “at rest”. Data is encrypted on premise before it is sent to the external storage via a network connection. This capability helps companies meet information security, data privacy, compliance and IP protection requirements.
• Substantially improved performance in terms of read-write access, page life expectancy, and other key SQL and Web Front End parameters.