Maintaining SharePoint Health During a "Super Sized" Growth Spurt

[RMossi]

If you have not seen the movie “Super Size Me,” you have most likely heard  of it.  The film is a documentary where the lead eats 3 meals a day at the golden arches for one month and super sizes each meal.  As a result, he proceeds to see negative effects  - lack of energy,  weight gain,  decreased performance.  Sure, bigger can be better… but will super sizing your SharePoint storage environment (because you can) be your answer?

Did you know…? *

• Scale is a focus for SharePoint– Microsoft Scalability highlighted updated performance numbers and a scalability demo featuring a 14TB single content database that successfully failed over in 5 seconds  (very impressive)
• 80% of Fortune 500 companies have deployed SharePoint
• There are over 65,000 unique customers

So where does that leave SharePoint customers?   Growth is inevitable.  How you handle growth can be your salvation or demise.  Leveraging SharePoint archiving is one means to handing this potentially massive growth spurt. 

The inherent value of archiving removes data from the SharePoint environment and manages the data in the archive - adding dedupe (to eliminate repeat data), compression  and retention  to SharePoint data.   Once  archived, the content database can be sustained at a constant level, maintaining performance and avoiding the ever-popular SharePoint pruning task.  There is also a direct affect on data protection.  Less data means less to back up … coincidentally that would mean less to recover, as well  (since the data resides in a protected archive).

So unlike the lead in “Super Size Me,” your SharePoint environment’s health ‘can’ be maintained during an excessive growth spurt.    For more information please check out our SharePoint auto-demo:  http://bit.ly/hSbmWt

Next time - What we do not address here is the  topic of  governance of SharePoint data … Look for future blog posts on that topic.    

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* Source: Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference in Anaheim in California  Oct 2 through Oct 6^th 2011 – Keynote speech.