SPTechWeb Logo
Home About Us  Advertise       
 
 

Top five SharePoint performance killers




March 7, 2012 —  (Page 2 of 2)

3 – Old and unused files. Much of the content in SharePoint goes unused for long periods of time. Many organizations waste storage resources by keeping these old files around and backing them up as they do active content.

McNulty said this really is as much an ECM issue as a storage issue. “You need to understand the life cycle of information,” he said. “Create rules where content needs to be around for a certain length of time but doesn’t have to be in SharePoint. Have processes where things can move out of SharePoint into storage.”

An example he cited is work holiday lists. Workers really only want to search this year’s holiday list and don’t need prior years. That, he said, could either go into storage, or even be purged from the system altogether.

When SharePoint storage grows, McNulty pointed out, the biggest issue organizations run into is backup. “Big databases are inefficient to back up from SharePoint,” he explained. “Backup cycles can start to run four hours, eight hours, and that’s a practical pain point.”

4 – Not building to scale. As SharePoint content grows, Quest said, its supporting hardware can be underpowered. McNulty said there can always be a hardware solution to underperformance, but more efficient and less costly methods need to be identified. “Understand what SharePoint is intended to be used for, and this starts to give context around what you want in your SharePoint, and what you don’t want,” he said.

5 – Not leveraging Microsoft’s data externalization features. Microsoft’s first point solution for SharePoint storage was EBS: external BLOB storage, which was introduced for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and is available and supported on SharePoint 2010. But there is no commitment to support beyond the 2010 platform; Microsoft’s committed, going-forward storage solution is now RBS: remote BLOB storage.

“Microsoft’s answer with RBS is to move data from the content database to somewhere else accessible with a provider interface,” McNulty said. Microsoft provides a free way of doing RBS with its file stream provider, which allows organizations to put content in file shares on the same machine as their SQL Server, he said.

So, taking the time to understand what you’re using your SharePoint installation for, and creating rules about managing the content, are the first steps to getting a grip on your storage problems.

— David

Pages 1 2 


Share this link: https://sptechweb.com/link/36425

Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     





 
 
This site's content Copyright © 1999 - 2012 by BZ Media LLC, All rights reserved.
Legal and Privacy
• E-mail: