SQL Server was never engineered to house Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) beyond a certain size. Managing BLOBs requires a significant share of SQL Server’s I/O, CPU and RAM cycles, without offering any benefits of these BLOBs being stored in a relational database. Also, as the importance of SharePoint for the enterprise increases, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is required. This means that BLOBs have to be moved out of the database.

Business Benefits of StoragePoint

Performance: By reducing the SQL Server database size by about 95%, overall SharePoint performance increases significantly. Pages and documents will download much faster, enhancing the SharePoint user experience.

Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM): StoragePoint manages where in your network BLOBs are stored. This can be any SAN, NAS, CAS, DAS or cloud drive. To determine which BLOBs go where, you can define simple rules, based on document characteristics like "content type," "document type," "SharePoint Site," etc.

Archiving: Documents of a specific age can be moved to lower-tier storage and eventually even to the cloud.

Easy Backups: Backups are significantly faster, as they are much more granular, than simply backing up a content database.

Storage Cost: Moving less-important data off the enterprise SAN and to lower-tier storage space or even the cloud leads to signficant cost savings.