Introducing AvePoint’s New BLOB Calculator Tool

How do you determine the best storage optimization plan for your SharePoint environment? It’s old news that External Binary Large Object (BLOB) Store (EBS) and Remote BLOB Store (RBS) solutions offer significant storage savings for SharePoint content, especially when customers utilize solutions like DocAve Storage Manager for optimizing their storage policies. Storage planning, however, requires metrics from your environment in order to meet your specific business needs. To determine the Return on Investment of using Storage Manager in your environment, you will need to complete the following steps: 1. Analyze the size distribution of BLOBs in your environment 2. Determine how much content will I be externalizing to cheaper storage 3. Calculate the difference in cost for storage 4. Optionally consider savings of using a tiered storage model and the cloud Analyzing the size distribution of BLOBs in your environment is important because it gives you a realistic view of what size groupings make up significant portions of your BLOB data. This conversely enables you to calculate accurate ROI and configure your Storage Manager rules based on your real environment. The BLOB calculator accomplishes this by providing you histogram data of the BLOBs in your environment based on size. For example, assuming a maximum BLOB size of 10MB, with an increment of 1MB, the calculated result will return summary level information on your BLOB content inside your SharePoint farm by web application as well as a breakdown of the BLOB distribution. Summary

Farm	Web Application	Content Database	Database Size (MB)	Total BLOB Size (MB)	BLOB Count
MyFarm A	http://intranet/	WSS_Content_Intranet	1547345.9	31376.8	18681
MyFarm A	http://extranet/	WSS_Content_Extranet	6074.91	2776.83	342

BLOB Distribution of the Intranet

0MB < x ≤ 1MB	1MB < x ≤ 2MB	2MB < x ≤ 3MB	3MB < x ≤ 4MB	4MB < x ≤ 5MB	5MB < x ≤ 6MB	6MB < x ≤ 7MB	7MB < x ≤ 8MB	8MB < x ≤ 9MB	9MB < x ≤ 10MB
11.28%	10.54%	4.68%	17.32%	4.53%	0.00%	0.00%	14.05%	3.98%	4.77%

*Note that the total percentage only adds up to 70.65%. This is because the other 29.35% is larger than 10MB. You could see this by extending your maximum BLOB size. Now for the really easy part! If we graph this, we can see that more than half of the BLOB content in our intranet can be found at 7MB or larger. So in this environment, with a content database of about 150GB and BLOBs totaling 30GB, a Storage Manager rule of >=7MB would externalize slightly more than 15 GB of content. blob calculator.png

Now we get to the part of the calculation that requires more insight into how much you are spending. Let’s assume a $4 per GB, per month of premium SQL storage versus a $0.75 per month of an off-the-shelf storage option. This means that the total ROI for this example is $11.25 per month ($4*15 - $.75*15). To get started for yourself please visit our BLOB calculator, which also includes more documentation on how to best utilize the tool for your business needs.

Introducing AvePoint’s New BLOB Calculator Tool

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