If you are currently evaluating 3rd party vendor support for SharePoint, you may already know that there are 2 MAJOR vendors in the marketplace that support RBS (Remote Blob Storage).
Of course, they are AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager and Metalogix StoragePoint.
For the most part, these 2 products have comparable feature sets.
Therefore, I will just provide a small comparison table that I compiled that differentiates the most salient feature differences between the 2 products that I have discovered:
As you can see from the table above, the major distinguishing feature between the 2 products is Doc Storage Manager's capability to manage multiple SharePoint Farms from a single Centralized Management Console. This is due to the major architectural difference between the 2 products--while Metalogix StoragePoint is deployed as a SharePoint Farm Feature, AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager is installed and deployed separately from SharePoint. It then uses DocAve Agents to communicate with the Storage Manager servers to provide RBS management of the various SharePoint Farms.
Of course, the AvePoint solution may be more expensive than the Metalogix StoragePoint solution overall since it requires the deployment of additional hardware or VMs to provide management and maintenance of the various SharePoint Farms as well as licensing for ALL servers in the SharePoint Farm, but it is certainly a convenience if your organization is managing numerous SharePoint Farms and environments. While Metalogix StoragePoint offers a similar capability through use of its Replicator for SharePoint tool, it is an entirely separate product, whereby the functionality to manage multiple farms is built into the fundamental architecture of the AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager product.
If you are conducting your own evaluation of these 2 RBS providers, the above points should definitely be considered as part of your overall evaluation.
However, depending on your business needs and budget constraints, either product is a suitable candidate for handling your SharePoint RBS Storage requirements!
Of course, they are AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager and Metalogix StoragePoint.
For the most part, these 2 products have comparable feature sets.
Therefore, I will just provide a small comparison table that I compiled that differentiates the most salient feature differences between the 2 products that I have discovered:
| Feature | AvePoint Storage Manager | Metalogix StoragePoint |
| Supports Multiple SharePoint Farms | X | Requires Metalogix StoragePoint Replicator to support |
| Provides a Centralized Management Console | X | |
| Provides additional security for managing RBS separate from SharePoint Farm Administrators | X | |
| Installs as a Farm Feature | X | |
| Fast and easy to install | X | |
| Requires additional hardware/servers to deploy | X | |
| Supports Claims Based Authentication for RBS Management | X | |
| Supports encryption of BLOBs | X | X |
| Provides variety of storage mediums including SAN, NAS and Cloud Storage | X | X |
| Provides configurable storage rules | X | X |
| Support both EBS and RBS | X | X |
| Support both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 | X | X |
| Provides support for recovery of items back to SharePoint | X | X |
| Additional SharePoint products from same vendor integrate into same unified User Interface | X | Products have separate and completely different User Interfaces |
| Includes Data Protection/Backup tool licensing | Licensed as a separate product | X |
| Licensing | Licensed by number of overall servers in the SharePoint Farm | Licensed by number of WFEs and amount of storage utilized |
As you can see from the table above, the major distinguishing feature between the 2 products is Doc Storage Manager's capability to manage multiple SharePoint Farms from a single Centralized Management Console. This is due to the major architectural difference between the 2 products--while Metalogix StoragePoint is deployed as a SharePoint Farm Feature, AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager is installed and deployed separately from SharePoint. It then uses DocAve Agents to communicate with the Storage Manager servers to provide RBS management of the various SharePoint Farms.
Of course, the AvePoint solution may be more expensive than the Metalogix StoragePoint solution overall since it requires the deployment of additional hardware or VMs to provide management and maintenance of the various SharePoint Farms as well as licensing for ALL servers in the SharePoint Farm, but it is certainly a convenience if your organization is managing numerous SharePoint Farms and environments. While Metalogix StoragePoint offers a similar capability through use of its Replicator for SharePoint tool, it is an entirely separate product, whereby the functionality to manage multiple farms is built into the fundamental architecture of the AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager product.
If you are conducting your own evaluation of these 2 RBS providers, the above points should definitely be considered as part of your overall evaluation.
However, depending on your business needs and budget constraints, either product is a suitable candidate for handling your SharePoint RBS Storage requirements!
I know it can get lost in amongst all the other awesome SharePoint tools Quest (soon to be Dell) sells but a growing number of customers are also looking at Storage Maximizer from Quest Software for their SharePoint RBS fix. No extra hardware, simplified rules engine and quite literally the world's fastest to install RBS solution for SharePoint at a cost, well, you'll be amazed how much you can save with Quest!
ReplyDeleteLicense is included so download and go within 5 minutes!!
Check it out at http://www.quest.com/storage-maximizer-for-sharepoint/
StoragePoint is installed as a farm-wide solution, as is AvePoint. The difference is that AvePoint uses a centralized interface outside of SharePoint to control multiple farms, which requires additional hardware, VMs and so forth so is arguably more complex to configure. Using a separate console in AvePoint also means that if this part of the infrastructure fails (e.g. the server or network the console is installed on has an issue), this could impact SharePoint’s operation and become a single point of failure.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, StoragePoint installs quickly and easily into the farm as a SharePoint solution, using the Microsoft approved APIs and methodologies. It becomes part of the SharePoint infrastructure and is managed through the same UI as other SharePoint operations. If you need to duplicate configurations between farms these can be easily imported/exported.
Your point about integration with other Metalogix products is incorrect. StoragePoint programmatically integrates with our recovery and migration solutions, which leverage StoragePoint features to extend item-level recovery or speed up migrations.
StoragePoint includes the capability to backup BLOB stores out of the box and can integrate with the customer’s existing backup strategy, unlike AvePoint which requires separate modules. Metalogix Selective Restore Manager, an item-level recovery product, is included with StoragePoint and integrates with its BLOB backup feature as well providing item recovery from SQL backups.
Can we have DocAve / Metalogix solutions to externalise blobs on SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition or do we need Enterprise edition ?
ReplyDelete