If you aren’t using it already, you probably have Microsoft SharePoint somewhere in your future. Back in 2008, Bill Gates somewhat famously noted that SharePoint was the fastest growing application in Microsoft history. The momentum doesn’t seem to have slowed much in the years since, and numerous companies are adopting SharePoint to enhance collaboration and data sharing both internally and externally with partners or customers.
But while SharePoint can help your users work better, it presents a unique headache from a data protection perspective. To keep it simple, SharePoint backup troubles come in two main flavors: too much data growth, and a complex application environment.
Regarding data growth, SharePoint is becoming famous for “SharePoint sprawl” and projects running way over anticipated amounts of storage space. I was a rather early user of SharePoint as a Microsoft employee back in 2007, and one of the things that we saw in spades there was SharePoint sites growing like weeds. As soon as, say, the engineering group in my department got an overall site, another dozen people sprang up insisting they could use sub-sites. These then spawned further sub-sites. And this happened across all the different groups: engineering, test, support, marketing, etc.
One aspect of this was a proliferation of duplicate data. In my role, I would have some access to engineering sites that others in marketing didn’t, so if I got something interesting from an engineering site, naturally I posted it on the marketing site so my team could get access. This happened, I don’t know, about a thousand times a week! It seemed like it anyway. I wasn’t in a very large group by Microsoft standards (100+ people), but boy did our SharePoint get stuffed with documents quickly.
Traditional, file-based methods of backup – as we all know by now – have long been struggling to keep up with data growth, and SharePoint is no exception. Even if your backup works in the early stages of your SharePoint deployment, you mind find yourself running into problems sooner than you anticipate.
The other issue, and really the more important one, is the complexity of the SharePoint application environment. Even the simplest single server SharePoint environment combines a SQL database backend with multiple “sites,” search databases, and the need for individual item recovery (since SharePoint is still very much a big file server).
But almost any environment of any size will not be a single server but a SharePoint “farm.” And that’s where it gets hairy. Now your SharePoint application is split across multiple server roles: front-end web servers, application servers and sites, database servers. If your backup application doesn’t understand the farm in its entirety you may have big problems protecting what you need to protect and recovering what you need to recover.
The biggest validation of this challenge is the proliferation of SharePoint specific backup products on the market. Indeed, an entire industry exists of products designed to backup SharePoint better than the legacy backup products handle it. In fact, a well known data protection industry analyst said to me that legacy product coverage of SharePoint was “pretty pathetic” (this was a conversational remark, so I’m not mentioning names).
The trouble with point products is that they represent extra cost, a new learning curve, and they remain forever outside the rest of your backup environment. Do you really want one backup solution for everything except SharePoint? (This is assuming you are already lucky enough to have figured out how to do everything else with one solution!)
We think NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup has some exceptional SharePoint features in terms of both backup and recovery, especially for a general purpose solution that you can also use for the rest of your data protection.
Rather than elaborate on those features here, I will invite you to a webinar I am doing later today (Thursday, May 26th at 1:00 p.m. EST). I’ll be describing our SharePoint solution and also providing a demo so you can see it in action. You can sign up for the webinar here. Even if you register and can’t make the live presentation, we’ll send you a link for the recorded version as soon as it’s available.
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