Compatibility between Enterprise Vault and Sharepoint 2010 Remote BLOB Storage

Problem

Background on Remote BLOB Storage feature

Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is a storage management solution for SharePoint. RBS was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and requires that the SharePoint content database be housed on SQL 2008 R2.

SharePoint content databases tend to grow extremely large as more and more content is added—especially if no retention policy is in place. The RBS solution is designed to move large files stored in SharePoint (hereafter referred to as Binary Large Objects, or BLOBs) out of SQL and onto alternate storage, leaving behind a BLOB ID in the SharePoint database. This BLOB ID is then used to link to the stored BLOB for access to the content.

RBS solutions are used to optimize storage use and cost with regard to SharePoint and SQL, but they are not a replacement for Enterprise Vault for SharePoint. Many of our customers want to leverage RBS for immediate storage savings but also want to move content into Enterprise Vault for long-term storage or for e-discovery.

Cause

How archiving works in an environment with RBS enabled
 

When Enterprise Vault archives an item in a SharePoint environment that utilizes RBS, it reads the content of the item to be via SharePoint. Enterprise Vault is not and does not need to be aware of whether the content is stored in SQL or in a remote BLOB store. Enterprise Vault will still replace the item with a shortcut (in this case, the "content" of the item being replaced is actually the aforementioned BLOB ID) that links to the actual item in Enterprise Vault.   When the BLOB ID is replaced with a shortcut, the associated BLOB is left in an orphaned state in the remote BLOB store and will be cleaned up during the garbage collection process by the BLOB store provider. From that point, the item will only exist in Enterprise Vault and will be represented in SharePoint with a shortcut. The item in Enterprise Vault is fully searchable (both content and metadata) via SharePoint as long as the shortcut is in place.

Solution

General compatibility

Due to the design of Enterprise Vault and how it interacts with the SharePoint system, it is expected that Enterprise Vault will work with any RBS solution.

Certified compatibility

Veritas has formally tested and certified Enterprise Vault 12 with the following RBS solutions:

DocAve 6
Microsoft FILESTREAM
Storage Point