La solution AvePoint
The office chose to implement DocAve, the enterprise-class infrastructure management platform for SharePoint. DocAve enables centralized or delegated management of SharePoint farms, including solutions for data protection and storage optimization. “We knew SharePoint was going to grow, and AvePoint gave us the tools we needed manage it,” Mulanax said. “We have deployed 86 different applications for our various information systems, but DocAve gives me the convenience of using only one central application to manage our SharePoint environment.”
DocAve Backup and Restore provides the agency with business-aware, comprehensive protection of its SharePoint environment. The tool offers full-fidelity backup and restore of all SharePoint content, including sites, lists, libraries, workflow definitions and instances, configurations, permissions, metadata, and version histories. The office was able to set up a backup plan that met its specific needs and have it run automatically. “Every night, we run a full platform backup followed by a granular backup of our most critical data,” Mulanax said. “Once that’s complete I receive an email notification letting me know it worked. DocAve works consistently and I don’t have to worry about it.”
In one instance, the agency’s technical services site was mistakenly deleted. The office lost documentation on all of its applications, backup schemas, and more. Previously, retrieving this important information would involve working with another team that manages SQL backups and potentially take days to restore. With DocAve, the process was much faster. “DocAve allowed us to restore our deleted site within 30 minutes,” Mulanax said. “It worked 100 percent, and I was able to do it without the help of other teams.”
DocAve Storage Manager helped the agency optimize its system and prepare for future SharePoint growth. DocAve combines multiple real-time and scheduled business rules to externalize BLOB content based on file size, type, or other document properties. With large files such as training videos, evidence photographs, PDFs, and Word documents in the system, the agency ensures anything larger than one megabyte is stored outside of SharePoint’s SQL Server content database and instead on more cost-effective, scalable virtualized servers. “DocAve automatically moved 84 percent of our SharePoint data off of our SQL Server storage – helping ensure we were within Microsoft’s recommended limits for content databases,” Mulanax said.
Not only were end-users able to access and interact with the externalized content just as before, but the optimization of SharePoint’s content database allowed them to do it even faster. “After implementing DocAve, we saw immediate performance improvement within 24 hours,” Mulanax said. “Videos, photos, and other documents now open much faster, allowing our teams to be more productive on a daily basis.”