AvePoint Releases FREE BLOB Management Tool for SharePoint 2007 and 2010

A few weeks back, I had written a quick post about BLOB (Binary Large OBject) storage in SharePoint. Well, one of our partners, AvePoint, released yet another of their tools for FREE, the DocAve Extender, for SharePoint 2007 and 2010, to aid in this matter.

Straight from their website – here is some more information on the groundbreaking release of this tool, for free.

“Databases like SQL Server are designed to handle relational data of relatively small size (typically less than 1MB). However, when it comes to larger, non-relational data streams, known as Binary Large Objects (or BLOBs), databases like SQL are not optimal. This is because managing BLOB I/O calls takes up substantial SQL CPU and memory resources.

Since more than 95% of the data a typical organization uploads into SharePoint are BLOBS, SharePoint’s SQL resources become quite overburdened, and have less capacity to perform transactional data operations and queries.

To avoid this, organizations have a few options. The first option is to spend money on additional SQL Server resources. But SQL Server licensing is relatively expensive when compared to file-based storage, so this is not the most cost-effective route.

The second, more cost-efficient option is to extend this BLOB content directly to file-based storage, while providing unfettered user access to the BLOB content via SharePoint.  To do this, administrators can either:

• Write custom code that leverages Microsoft’s APIs to create their own BLOB management functionality
• Buy some expensive third party tool
• Use AvePoint’s FREE DocAve Extender.

With DocAve Extender, BLOBs are never stored on the SQL Server database, meaning SharePoint can perform optimally, your SQL Server resources can be utilized efficiently, and your database costs can be kept to an absolute minimum.”

The utility allows you to literally have terabytes of data within a single content database. It can be encrypted and compressed as well for secure and trimmed storage, and stored on file servers, NAS, SAN, or even Cloud storage mediums.

So if you are looking to offload large file storage in SharePoint from your SQL server – look no further. http://www.avepoint.com/sharepoint-storage-extender-docave/.