Getting SharePoint Under Control

12:45 PM -- At the end of 2008, Microsoft's SharePoint had an adoption rate of about 55 percent and it shows no signs of slowing down. Such rapid adoption raises a few questions: Is IT ready to absorb and manage an enterprise-wide SharePoint deployment? Should a SharePoint environment have its own kind of archive? Should companies plan for an intelligent archive as part of the deployment so as to more effectively store, protect, and retrieve vital collaboration content? I posed these questions to the guys over at Mimosa Systems.

I learned that Mimosa Systems has just announced a new offering, NearPoint for SharePoint. This is good for those who have been struggling with the need to archive their SharePoint environments and are feeling the burgeoning costs associated with increased storage requirements -- and that seems to be pretty much everyone with SharePoint.

As SharePoint deployments have swelled, companies have been struggling to keep up with the accelerating business demand to archive all the new content that users are creating and sharing. While there are huge productivity gains with SharePoint, its distributed deployment allows storage to grow and essentially become a dumping ground. Over time, large items and a large numbers of files start to negatively impact performance, and Version Document Libraries wind up storing full copies of document versions.

Also, many organizations have been struggling with the inability to replicate across server farms, the fact that native SharePoint backup is all-or-nothing, and that item-level restoration is a very difficult task. From a recovery perspective, to assure a proper recovery approximately two times the amount of storage is needed for the recovery farm and scratch areas -- and there are no rollback capabilities.

With regard to retention management, SharePoint's highly distributed model can lead to compliance and e-discovery risks -- items and files scattered about around the world are difficult to manage and properly retain. Policy enforcement has been a devil to deal with as policies are applied within folders, not across folders. Multiple instances of documents can exist across servers, making them hard to mange within a standard set of policies, and there has been no easy way to recall historical content.Over the past four years, Mimosa has tackled the tough job of harnessing Exchange and filesystem archiving and stemming uncontrolled storage growth. Adding SharePoint support enables Mimosa users to more effectively archive, protect, and apply e-discovery polices to created content throughout the enterprise.

NearPoint's scale-out grid architecture captures, stores, and manages SharePoint content in a single-instance indexed repository and supports delta versioning, which will enable companies to reduce the amount of storage required for archiving. Recovery with NearPoint provides centralized data protection for distributed SharePoint farms, supporting fine-grained recovery (restoration of lists and items), and coarse-grained recovery (recovers full environments and can aid with migration). The GUI that manages all of this is easy to use and provides the user/administrator with an easy-to-understand hierarchy.

The e-discovery piece of NearPoint for SharePoint provides browse, search and discovery against content, a preview pane for SharePoint List items (blogs, tasks, calendars, and wiki pages), e-discovery workflow for search, review lists, tagging, case management, and export load files. Also supported are in-place legal holds on SharePoint content alongside emails and files.

With greater information sharing and collaboration, there is an increased need for a centralized method to archive and apply business polices -- and to avoid cost where we can. Clearly, NearPoint for SharePoint is one offering that enables organizations to standardize on archival of vital collaboration efforts, more effectively support corporate governance and compliance with an up-to-date e-discovery methodology, and avoid costs by optimizing storage space.

Find out more about innovative storage. InformationWeek and Byte and Switch are hosting a virtual event on this topic on March 25. Sign up now (registration required).Tom Trainer is founder and president of analyst firm Analytico. Prior to founding Analytico, Trainer was managing senior partner at Evaluator Group, and has also worked at EMC, HDS, Auspex, and Memorex-Telex during his 30-year career in IT.