Sharepoint - external storage for documents

Question

I am now extending some features of our corporate sharepoint, and one of the wishes of my customer is following:

Sharepoint farm has little space allocation, about 2 Gb per department. The department I am working with has hundreds of midsized documents (4-10 Mb in average, pptx, doc, pdf...) per month to be stored permanently. Currently they do it in a NAS file share. They want however to store them in Sharepoint for accessibility, but avoiding the 2Gb limit. Is there a way to integrate the external file storage to the Sharepoint?

Alternatively, is it possible to store the file data in a database (i.E. Access or MS SQL) but avoiding the farm-wide installations of frameworks like RBS?

Answer 1

You can using Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) as part of your data storage solution.

Check the article: Manage RBS in SharePoint Server

Before you migrate your BLOBs out of the database, you’ll need to choose an option. Here are several typical options:

1.File System: You can use a normal file system (perhaps a large disk partition on a file server) to store your BLOBs.

2.SAN/NAS Storage: Storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) are usually high-end storage options. They’re expensive, but well-suited if the business value of your documents and their size can justify the cost. Both SAN and NAS provide data replication and mirroring and seamless growth into terabytes of data.

3.Cloud Storage: This is useful in at least two situations. First, when you’re running SharePoint in the cloud, but still want to externalize the BLOBs, your natural choice is to store them in a nearby, vendor-provided cloud storage. The second is when you’re running SharePoint within your own datacenter but want to store or archive all BLOBs in the cloud due to space limitations or reliability issues in your datcenter. Archiving is the most common reason in this situation. Make sure that if a user is creating or modifying document for cloud storage that your EBS or RBS provider does this in the background, as it could degrade performance. You also want to make sure your third-party EBS or RBS provider supports storing BLOBs in the cloud storage.

More information is here: Optimize SharePoint with External Storage

Answer 2

RBS is the way to leverage non-SQL Server storage for your BLOBs. Any other approach you take will be a hack/work around. Only your customer's requirements can tell us if the limitations of these workarounds are acceptable. For example, you could store the files elsewhere (network share or cloud share) and have SharePoint Search index them. In this case you loose out on a consistent UI for managing content and you'd still need the SP hosting team's help to setup the search crawling.

The real answer is to work with your customer to document their business needs and why IT's offering doesn't meet that need so that they can give you more space.