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Captain Kirk - a cloud pioneer

By default, when you upload a document or any other large file to SharePoint, it gets stored as a Binary Large OBject (BLOB) in the content database in SQL Server.  As revisions are made, each version of that file also gets stored (not just the differences).  The amount of BLOB data grows significantly faster than associated metadata, causing SharePoint to consume large amounts of expensive SQL Storage space.  Burzin talked about externalizing BLOB storage, as well as options for storing infrequently used BLOBs in the Cloud. These approaches can help ease the backup and storage cost problems content-heavy SharePoint sites encounter.

Burzin’s SharePoint Storage Best Practices talk also covered Configuration, Maintenance, and Performance Tuning.  He explained some of the unusual stresses SharePoint puts on SQL Server, and offered suggestions on how to avoid degraded performance.  If you’re planning a significant SharePoint implementation, you’ll want to take a close look at his specific recommendations regarding recommended I/O Capacities, Database configuration and sizing, processors and memory.

Given the headaches SharePoint BLOBs cause in many organizations, it makes sense that StorSimple has a complete solution to externalize them. Their storage-on-demand appliance provides tiered storage for SharePoint with the option to secure and store infrequently updated BLOBs to the cloud to achieve substantial cost savings.  According to Ursheet Parikh, StorSimple’s Founder and CEO, Burzin’s extensive SQL Server and SharePoint experience make him a key member of the StorSimple team.

I’ll write about StorSimple’s product in an upcoming post, and will follow that with a case study once DesignMind has had a chance to implement StoreSimple’s Cloud Storage Solution for one of our clients.  For data storage, Space is the Final Frontier.

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At the November 2009 PASS Summit in Seattle, one of the outstanding keynote presentations was by Dr. Dave DeWitt, Microsoft Fellow, and leader of the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, in Madison, WI.  I received a copy of his slide deck from PASS Headquarters, which you can see below.

Dr. DeWitt is working on releases 1 and 2 of SQL Server Parallel Database Warehouse.  In his keynote he reviewed the 30 year history of CPU, memory, and disk performance.  Variations in performance gains across these subsystems, with disk performance lagging badly, have major impacts on database system performance.

Disk performance gains have been made in three areas, Capacity, Transfer Rate, and Average Seek Time.  However, the gains over the last 30 years have not been uniform.

Capacity of high performance disk drives has increased by a factor of 10,000.  Transfer rates have increased by a factor of 65.  The average seek time has only increased by a factor of 10.  Dr. DeWitt talked about the impact of these discrepancies on OLTP and Data Warehouse applications.

One of his conclusions is that some problems can be fixed through smarter software, but that SSDs provide the only real help.

Fusion-io

We learned more about SSDs during the Fusion-io presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group.  The DesignMind team has also been evaluating SSDs to determine situations where we can provide our clients with the most leverage.  Plus here’s a terrific video which shows SSD‘s in action.

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