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Reduce Database Size with BLOB Externalization

StorageEdge lets you migrate all your BLOBs out of your database and into a more suitable storage. By doing this, you reduce database size by as much as 90% and also reduce the BLOB traffic to the database. All of this dramatically improves your database performance. Here are some benefits of externalizing BLOBs out of the database.

Why Externalize BLOBs?

The bottom line is that relational databases were designed to keep structured relational data and not BLOBs. Here are some reasons why you should externalize BLOBs:

  • With BLOBs, database size becomes too large to manage
  • BLOB I/O degrades database performance significantly
  • Database uses expensive storage and BLOBs increase this cost
  • With BLOBs, database backup/recovery becomes very difficult

How StorageEdge Externalizes BLOBs?

StorageEdge implements an External BLOB Storage (EBS) and Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) providers for SharePoint 2007 & 2010. Both providers plug into SharePoint seamlessly and intercept all BLOB requests and route them to the external BLOB store while updating BLOB metadata in the content database.

StorageEdge is installed on all Web Front End (WFE) servers in a SharePoint farm. Also, StorageEdge provides EBS for both SharePoint 2007 & 2010 and it works with both SQL Server Standard & Enterprise editions. StorageEdge also provides RBS but only for SharePoint 2010 and it only works for SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.


SharePoint EBS

StorageEdge BLOB Externalization Features

Some of the important BLOB externalization features in StorageEdge are described below. For more details, please see Edition Comparison.

  • Migrating existing BLOBs: Move all existing BLOBs out of SharePoint database to an external storage with the following features:
  • Storage Options: File system, SAN, NAS, & Cloud storage
  • Scheduling: Specify multiple time slots when this migration should happen
  • Throttling: Specify how fast or slow to migrate BLOBs in each time slot.
  • Gzip Compression for BLOBs
  • Encryption (64-bit & 128-bit)
  • Garbage Collection of orphaned BLOBs
  • Preserve Folder Structure & Filenames in external storage to be the same as in SharePoint
  • Much more…