microsoft sharepoint data externalization to ibm...

© Copyright IBM Corporation, 2014

Microsoft SharePoint data externalization to IBM storage

using AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager

Sanjay Sudam

IBM Systems and Technology Group ISV Enablement

May 2014

Microsoft SharePoint data externalization to IBM storage using AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager 1

Table of Contents

Abstract..................................................................................................................................... 2 Guidance and assumptions ..................................................................................................................... 2

Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 2

Solution components............................................................................................................... 2 IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system........................................................................................................ 2 AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager ........................................................................................................ 3

DocAve architecture .......................................................................................................... 3 BLOB externalization to the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system .......................................................... 4

General Storage best practices......................................................................................... 5 DocAve Storage Manager configuration ........................................................................... 5 Net Share physical device................................................................................................. 6 Logical device.................................................................................................................... 7 Enabling BLOB provider .................................................................................................... 9 Rule configuration – BLOB content offloading ................................................................ 11

Storage report ........................................................................................................................................ 13

Summary................................................................................................................................. 14

Resources............................................................................................................................... 15

About the author..................................................................................................................... 15

Trademarks and special notices ........................................................................................... 16


Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the value proposition of the content externalization to IBM System Storage using AvePoint Storage Manager for Microsoft SharePoint environments, and to provide best-practice configurations.

Guidance and assumptions

The intent of this paper is to provide architectural, deployment, and management guidelines for customers

who are planning or have already decided to implement Microsoft® SharePoint binary large object (BLOB)

externalization to the IBM® Storwize® family. This paper does not provide detailed performance numbers

or advanced high availability and disaster recovery techniques.

This paper assumes users have essential knowledge in the following areas as a prerequisite:

• IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system

• SharePoint

• Microsoft SQL database

Introduction

As organizations scale the use of SharePoint as a content management system, users are moving

workloads traditionally supported by file and email servers to SharePoint. In the process, larger content is

stored as BLOB in the content databases hosted by SQL Server, and often located on the most highly

performing and expensive tier 1 storage resources in the enterprise. The IBM Storwize V7000 Unified

storage system and AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager can deliver a fully integrated solution for BLOB

externalization. This allows you to relocate the BLOB content, which is the unstructured data that

represents the content of a document, to more cost-effective storage tiers.

This paper provides the installation and configuration guidelines for BLOB externalization to the IBM

Storwize V7000 Unified system.

Solution components

This section briefly describes the components used in this solution.

IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system

The IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system is a virtualizing Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)

storage system that supports both block and file protocols. This unified system includes the IBM Storwize

V7000 Unified system file module and the Storwize V7000 storage system. The file module is a clustered

system consisting of two units that provide file systems for use by network-attached storage (NAS). The

file module uses the storage from the Storwize V7000 system to provide file access to the clients. Other

volumes, which are block volumes, are provided on the storage area network (SAN) to be presented to

hosts.

IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system provides a globally clustered NAS file system built upon IBM General

Parallel File System (IBM GPFS™). This file system is created on at least one Network Shared Disk

(NSD). A NSD represents a logical unit number (LUN) of the underlying disk storage system and makes

the LUN available to all GPFS cluster nodes.


The global namespace is maintained across the cluster to balance workloads and provide parallel

performance to all users, which also ensures high availability (HA) and automated failover.

IBM Storwize V7000 Unified systems support client access protocol such as:

• Network File System (NFS)

• Common Internet File System (CIFS)

• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)

• Secure Copy Protocol (SCP)

• Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)

• Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP)

AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager

As SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 on-premises become the central repository for enterprise

content within organizations, increasing user adoption and integration from data sources can cause

unstructured data and BLOB content to consume up to 95 percent of SharePoint’s SQL Server space.

Larger BLOB content can lead to database performance and user experience degradation.

DocAve Storage Manager is based on Microsoft external BLOB storage (EBS) and remote BLOB storage

(RBS) application programming interfaces (APIs) to improve SQL server performance and reduce storage

costs. With DocAve, administrators can use customizable business rules in DocAve SharePoint storage

offerings along with a wide variety of supported storage devices to optimize hierarchical storage

management (HSM) and achieve truly comprehensive SharePoint storage management.

With DocAve Storage Manager, organizations can mitigate the negative consequences of exponential data

growth by combining multiple real-time and scheduled business rules to externalize BLOB content based

on file size, type, or other document properties, allowing SharePoint administrators to:

• Reduce SharePoint total cost of ownership (TCO) by using HSM systems for BLOB storage

• Improve user experience by optimizing SQL Server resources while maintaining seamless user

access and interaction to externalized content

• Easily comply with information governance policies for content lifecycle management within or

across multiple SharePoint farms with highly customizable business rules

DocAve architecture

DocAve architecture is modular and scalable to meet the customer requirements. The roles of a

DocAve server consist of:

• DocAve manager: Manages the communication and operations of the DocAve agents and

servers in the farm.

• DocAve media server: Manages the storage operations for the DocAve platform and coordinates

the storing of backup data, audit data, externalized SharePoint content, and all other storage

needs required by DocAve.

• DocAve agents: Manages the content as per the rules defined in the DocAve suite for BLOB

externalization, backup, recovery, and archiving the SharePoint content.


Figure 1: DocAve architecture

DocAve architecture is scalable, and administrators can choose the server deployment roles according to

the SharePoint environment. For example, in smaller environments, the DocAve manager and media

server roles can be deployed on the same server. It is even possible to deploy the DocAve server roles

onto the same hardware as your SharePoint farm servers, although this is not the recommended

configuration. For best performance, install the manager’s services across multiple servers and install only

the necessary agents on each server in the SharePoint farm.

BLOB externalization to the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system

This section describes the installation and configuration process of the DocAve products to optimize the

SharePoint storage with BLOB externalization to the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system. You need to

complete the following tasks before configuring the BLOB provider.

1. Ensure that Microsoft Active Directory services are available for authentication.

2. Make sure that SharePoint farm components and SQL server deployments are according to

Microsoft recommendations.

3. Install DocAve manager and media service roles. It is not recommended to deploy these services

on the SharePoint servers.

4. Install DocAve agents on each server in the SharePoint farm.


General storage best practices

Most of the Microsoft SharePoint data is stored within SQL Server, except for the index and a few

other supporting files. The following guidelines are some of the high-level best practices for the SQL

Server storage configuration.

• RAID 1 or 10 for the transaction logs

• RAID 5 for the databases files and temporary database files.

• Multipathing for high availability and better performance

The IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system provides both block and file access from the same system

and iSCSI storage volumes can be used for SQL Server database and CIFS file access for SharePoint

data as shown in Figure 2. It is highly recommended to use 10 gigabytes (GB) Ethernet for both iSCSI

and file access for better performance.

Figure 2: Lab configuration setup

DocAve Storage Manager configuration

This section provides detailed steps of configuration and recommendations to optimize SharePoint

storage by externalizing the BLOB content to the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system. Refer to the


DocAve guides at the following URL for detailed instructions about installing the DocAve manager,

media service, and agent components.

http://www.avepoint.com/assets/pdf/sharepoint_user_guides/DocAve_6_Installation_Guide.pdf

Net Share physical device

The network share created in this step can be used for SharePoint BLOB externalization. It is used for

offloading the BLOB content according to the rules defined in the DocAve manager. Storage Manager

allows to create multiple physical devices that can be used to build the hierarchical management

capabilities. For example, you can create two different CIFS shares, one from serial-attached SCSI

(SAS) storage pool and another from nearline SAS pool on the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system to

create the hierarchical storage capabilities for BLOB offloading, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: IBM Storwize V7000 Unified hierarchical tiers

Tier 1 SAS storage can be used for offloading the latest active data and lower tier 2 Nearline SAS can

be used to offload the older, inactive content from the SharePoint storage.

Perform the following steps to create Net Share physical devices:

1. Create CIFS shares on the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system and grant read/write

permissions to the domain account to be used by DocAve products.


2. In the DocAve manager interface, click Control Panel �� Storage Confiuration �� Physical

Device �� Create

3. Select Net Share from the Storage Type drop-down list, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: DocAve physical device creation

4. In the UNC Path field, enter the UNC share path created in step 1.

5. Enter the domain level account credentials to access the CIFS share.

6. Click OK to create the physical device. Verify that the device is listed under physical devices.

Repeat the steps to create additional physical devices using the CIFS shares created from the

Nearline SAS storage pool.

Logical device

Logical device is a grouping of the physical devices into a single device and used for offloading the

SharePoint content.

Perform the following steps to create Net Share physical devices.

1. In the DocAve Manager interface, click Control Panel �� Storage Configuration �� Logical

Device �� Create.


2. In the Data Storage section, select Logical device, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: DocAve logical device creation

3. Select the storage type as Net Share.

4. Select the physical device as Tier1-SAS created from the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified

system.

5. Click OK to create the logical device. Verify that the device is listed under logical devices.

Repeat the steps to create additional logical devices using the CIFS shares created from the nearline

SAS storage pool.


Enabling BLOB provider

You need to enable the BLOB provider to offload the SharePoint content to the external storage on a

periodic schedule basis or in real-time manner. Perform the following steps to enable the BLOB

provider on the SharePoint content database.

1. In the DocAve manager interface, go to the storage optimizer, select the scheduled storage

manager and then the BLOB provider to enable EBS or RBS for the SharePoint farm as

shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: DocAVE BLOB provider configuration

Microsoft SharePoint data externalization to IBM storage using AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager

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2. Configure the stub database as shown in the following figure. It is recommended to configure

the stub database for the entire SharePoint farm.

Figure 7: DocAve stub database configuration

3. Enable RBS for the SharePoint farm and configure the schedule for scanning.

Figure 8: DocAve BLOB enablement

4. Click OK to complete the BLOB provider configuration.


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Rule configuration – BLOB content offloading

DocAve offloads the content based on the rule criteria defined using document attributes such as size,

creation date, modified date, and version. Content that meets these rules will be offloaded from the

SharePoint storage and stored in the selected logical device. Perform the following steps to create

rules to offload the content from the SharePoint storage.

1. From the DocAve manager interface, go to the storage optimizer, select the scheduled

storage manager, select the web application, and click Create to create the new rule.

2. Select the Create a new rule option and provide a name for this rule.

3. Define the criteria for offloading the content. For example, a new rule named Tier1-rule is

created based on the document size to offload content of size greater than 256 KB to the IBM

SAS storage pool.

4. Define the logical device as Tier1-SAS created on the SAS storage pool from the IBM

Storwize V7000 Unified system.

Figure 9: BLOB rule criteria definition

Repeat the steps to create another rule, Tier2-NLSAS, to offload the content not modified in the last

one year to the nearline SAS storage pool created in the IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system.


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Figure 9: Nearline SAS rule definition

5. Apply and run these rules to scan the SharePoint content and offload the BLOB to the external

IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system.

Figure 10: Manual scanning of BLOB rules


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Storage report

DocAve provides a dashboard view of the BLOB and stub information collected from the SQL databases

and reports about the optimized capacities for the SharePoint farm. You can access the storage report

from the DocAve manager interface, select the schedule storage manager, and then select the storage

report. Perform the following tasks to generate the storage dashboard.

1. Create the profile by invoking the report profile wizard as shown in the following figure.

2. Select the whole farm or the relevant web applications for this profile to generate the report.

3. Define the schedule specifying whether to collect the data immediately or specify the

frequency to collect the data on a recurring basis.

4. Click Save or Save and Run Now to complete the rule definition.

Figure 11: Storage report profile creation

After running the profile, you can access the report by clicking the dashboard to view the SQL database

and optimized BLOB content size, as shown in the following figure.


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Figure 12: Storage dashboard report

DocAve also provides an ability to offload the BLOB content on a real-time basis to the IBM Storwize

V7000 Unified system.You can define rules based on the file size to externalize the content in real time.

Summary

The IBM Storwize V7000 Unified system and AvePoint DocAve Storage Manager provide a robust

platform needed for Microsoft SharePoint environments through the native characteristics of the storage

systems and integration through RBS/EBS API integrations to optimize the SharePoint storage by

offloading the larger BLOB content.


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Resources

The following websites provide useful references to supplement the information contained in this paper:

• IBM Systems on PartnerWorld

ibm.com/partnerworld/systems

• IBM Redbooks

ibm.com/redbooks

• IBM System Storage Interoperation Center (SSIC)

ibm.com/systems/support/storage/config/ssic/displayesssearchwithoutjs.wss?start_over=

yes

• IBM Storwize V7000 Unified

ibm.com/storage/storwizev7000

• IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller

ibm.com/systems/storage/software/virtualization/svc/index.html

• IBM TechDocs Library

ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/Web/TechDocs

• AvePoint DocAve Documentation

http://www.avepoint.com/resources/user-guides/

About the author

Sanjay Sudam is a Storage Technology Specialist in IBM Systems and Technology Group (ISV

Enablement) Organization. He has more than 15 years of experience working with various storage and

system technologies. You can reach Sanjay at [email protected].


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Trademarks and special notices

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