Archive for the ‘Storage Management’ Category

Back on December 30, 2009 I blogged about how cloud storage could have a problem catching on with larger enterprises because of a lesser known provision in the Patriot Act called the National Security Letters.

The last few days I’ve been in the Boston area with my fellow Mimosa Systems blogger Bill Tolson visiting and talking to our new coworkers are Iron Mountain.  I’m very excited about what is coming in the future for us and our customers.   Iron Mountain isn’t just one of the largest trucking company around (3200 trucks) and stores 600 million boxes with an average of 1,200 files each.   On the digital side there are also some impressive offerings and features.

First let me explain what BLOB stands for.  A Binary Large OBject is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single ‘file’ inside a database.  Within SharePoint these are your office documents, images, audio and video files.   While I have no doubts in the overall scalability of SharePoint, the product has some points that all SharePoint administrators and designers need to be aware off.  Microsoft is so kind to publish extensive documents that go over the software boundaries of SharePoint.  The following table lists the recommended guidelines for site objects according to Microsoft:

Exchange Storage management was what triggered the rapid uprise in email archiving tools in the beginning of the 2000.  It was primarily caused by the limited end user mailbox sizes that was caused by the limitations in storage, software and overall cost associated with it.  In the years after, organizations embraced stubbing as a means to clean out end users mailboxes in an attempt to keep storage costs in control.

First of all, many of you are wondering what RBS is.  Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is an API that is available as an add-on feature pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express.  It is designed to actually move the storage of binary large objects (BLOBs) from costly storage on database servers to cheaper storage solutions and is also available as  such for SharePoint Portal Server.  The advantages of RBS are that it can save you a significant amount of storage space, conserves hardware resources and allows the end user transparent access to their data.

Last week I spoke at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference on records management and eDiscovery. I will make my deck that I used available later this week, however while I was at Las Vegas one of the whitepapers that I worked on was made available on the Mimosa Website. You can actually download the whitepaper on this link.

This is a question that has been asked many times.During an upgrade to Exchange 2007 or even Exchange 2010 in the future, all mailbox data within the legacy Exchange 2003 Server would typically be migrated into the new Exchange 2007 Server. Since a migration will copy old, infrequently accessed, or fixed/static email data, it may be a time consuming and inefficient process depending on the volume of inactive data. The excessive bulk of this data will also impact performance and capacity on the new servers, and increase backup and restore times.

Today I ran across a report from AIIM which says that 18% of the companies that have SharePoint deployed within their organizations do not know if sensitive documents are actually stored within their SharePoint farm. Many people follow widely published SharePoint governance plans however now that SharePoint is getting more traction and more attention these plans are starting to fall short of preventing some issues.

Most organizations do see the benefit of SharePoint archiving to not only keep the excessive growth of their SharePoint farm in line, but also to ensure that only relevant data remains in the system. What many SharePoint archiving offerings from other 3rd parties do is what many people expect archiving to do. You take the blob out of the SharePoint content database and replace it pretty much with a stub, which sounds like a very plausible and logical thing to do.

The last few weeks I’ve been reading SharePoint governance plans and most plans really go into fine details who needs to be on board to get SharePoint successfully deployed in an organization. Microsoft released a paper recently that gives you a real detailed Internet SharePoint Governance Plan. Stakeholders like the SharePoint owner, server administrator, solution architect, designer and developer are all covered, but everywhere were I look at these plans I’m missing very important stakeholders in the decision processes. Where are HR and the General Legal Counsel?