These days SANs are equipped with more and more intelligent control software that provides advanced features in terms of archiving, security, replication, storage tiering, self-auditing and application awareness. Recently, we have come across the same question more and more:
“Will my SAN work with Metalogix StoragePoint?”
The short answer is “yes.” StoragePoint is completely SAN-agnostic and will work with any storage device accessible through a UNC path. All StoragePoint really does is allow the rule-based externalization of Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) formerly stored within the SQL Server database. Once these documents are externalized, StoragePoint will allow you to define additional rules to automatically move these BLOBs to the most cost-effective storage tier.
For even more cost savings, StoragePoint can connect to most popular cloud storage providers, such as Amazon, Rackspace and Windows Azure. To preserve performance, StoragePoint includes the ability to freely define the cache size, where the most popular documents are kept.
Here’s How It Works
The metadata for the Word document remains in SQL Server, while the BLOB is stored on the SAN. Documents older than 1 year are then moved to cheaper NAS storage. After 3 years they are moved to CAS and after 5 years these documents are stored on the organization’s cloud drive.
Advanced SAN Features
But let’s revisit the question regarding how StoragePoint works with various popular SAN products. As discussed above, StoragePoint is SAN-agnostic. However, there are adapters for StoragePoint that allow you to take advantage of your SAN’s advanced policy-based storage capabilities. In other words, these adapters will allow your SAN to receive SharePoint metadata and automatically apply the correct storage policy based on this metadata. On your SAN, you can also search for files by SharePoint metadata and synchronize the retention policy with SharePoint. In short, before acquiring a new SAN it is definitely worth taking a look to see if there’s a StoragePoint adapter available. However, even if there is no adapter and you want to go ahead with the SAN purchase, you will still be able to take advantage of most of StoragePoint’s benefits.
For further questions, please contact the authors at tvolk@prinomic.com or rclarke@prinomic.com.