StoragePoint vs. RBS FILESTREAM Provider

The RBS FILESTREAM provider that is available as a free download was created to provide an upgrade path for customers running SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint Services 3.0 with the Windows Internal Database Engine (WIDE).

SharePoint Foundation deployments running on SQL Server 2008 Express R2 are limited to 10GB in total therefore making upgrades from WSS 3.0 with WIDE impossible (assuming you have a content database that is larger than 10GB). The RBS FILESTREAM provider gives these customers an upgrade path. Customers looking for a BLOB management solution should use caution when considering the RBS FILESTREAM provider as it was not built as an enterprise class solution.

Below is a feature comparison between the RBS FILESTREAM provider and StoragePoint.

Feature	RBS FILESTREAM	StoragePoint
BLOB Externalization
Offload BLOBs to remote (NAS, CAS, or Cloud) storage platforms	BLOB store must be local to SQL Server
Outbound BLOB cache for off-premises (i.e. Cloud) operations
Define multiple storage locations (endpoints) per content database
Filter endpoints by file type or scope (i.e. list or content type)
Take endpoints offline (and/or send notifications) if they fill up or enter an error state
Use SharePoint filename or folder on offloaded BLOBs
Promote SharePoint properties to endpoint
Securely delete (shred) BLOBs
Report and Health Monitor Dashboard
Administration User Interface		Central Admin
PowerShell Support
Compression
Encryption		Transmission and "at rest"
Tiered Storage (HSM) support
Move BLOBs to less expensive tiers of storage based on admin-defined aging rules
Move BLOBs to less expensive tiers of storage based on admin-defined retained versions rules
Move BLOBs to less expensive tiers of storage based on admin-defined metadata change rules
Orphaned BLOB Garbage Collection	Basic	Policy-based

References

The following sites provide information about the RBS FILESTREAM provider including limitations to the solution.

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748607(office.14).aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/opal/archive/2009/12/07/sharepoint-2010-beta-with-filestream-rbs-provider.aspx

Overall Considerations

• Can I live without or do I want to build an Administration UI?
• Do I want to maintain it across SharePoint and SQL service packs?
• Do I want to build my own monitoring and reporting tools?
• How am I going to handle backup and recovery or replication?
• Do I need or want the ability to tier storage by age or change in state?
• Will I need to encrypt the BLOBs?
• Will out of the box garbage collector and migrate jobs perform well in my environment?
• Do I need or want to build platform-specific connectors

Stubbing Methods (i.e. HTML Placeholders or redirects)

• They break a a significant level of SharePoint functionality
• Passive vs. Active function
• BLOBs are inserted in database then removed
• Creates significant fragmentation in database tables
• SharePoint Crawler grabs HTML placeholder, not BLOB
• 3rd party SharePoint solutions using object model won't work (i.e. anything using SPFile.OpenBinary)
• Generally lowers SharePoint performance

Native SharePoint EBS (External BLOB Store) API

• Introduced with WSS 3.0 SP1, supported (currently deprecated) in SharePoint 2010
• Very little documentation for COM interface
• Natively implemented as a farm-wide scoped feature; all BLOBs are remoted
• No orphaned BLOB garbage collection
• Significant development/trial and error effort required for a production-level solution

Native SQL RBS (Remote BLOB Store) API

• Capability of SQL 2008, only supported in SharePoint 2010
• Well documented .NET interface
• Natively implemented as a content database scoped feature
• Orphaned BLOB garbage collection is present out of the box
• Significant development effort required for a production-level solution