NetApp White Paper Sample

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is rapidly becoming a popular enterprise application and productivity tool as organizations seek to enhance collaboration and enable information accessibility. Outfitted with new features for enterprise content management and tighter integration with Microsoft Office productivity tools, MOSS now ranks, in many organizations, as a 'mission-critical‘ application, not unlike Exchange. Therefore, minimizing downtime, protecting data, and meeting compliance requirements now go hand-in-hand with its new-found status. However, due to a server farm architecture, a complex platform configuration, and a document repository consisting of one or more SQL Server databases, MOSS presents some interesting storage choices as well as unique backup/recovery challenges (especially when it comes to granular recovery).

It‘s not uncommon for users to report that SharePoint and its storage are "growing like weeds"and, although the association may be an unfair one given the benefits SharePoint can bestow, it does highlight the challenges that follow in terms of rational and flexible storage provisioning! Although it is not yet the biggest (by sales) application from Microsoft, nor the biggest (by projects) application supported by NetApp, it is one of the fastest growing for each company. With such importance and focus, it is of paramount importance to consider the challenges for IT in terms of storage—not only in terms of SharePoint itself, but also in terms of the broader and dynamic IT environment.