Chalcroft quadruples its content storage space

“StoragePoint is extremely easy-to-use. It’s just point, click and go,” said Claire Edgson, Group IT Manager at Chalcroft. “We were able to offload 98 percent of the content to different, less expensive tiers of storage. Our SQL Server was finally able to breathe and it made our SharePoint faster. I would estimate that what we saved is easily three times what StoragePoint cost us.”

When Chalcroft initially deployed SharePoint 2010, the company did not realize that its SharePoint content would grow as rapidly as it did to consume so much valuable storage space, time, and resources. As a construction company, the content that was uploaded into SharePoint consisted of very large files, such as blueprints and drawings, which consistently exceeded 10 megabytes. The deployment began with less than one terabyte of content, but ballooned to 7 terabytes in the first year and exceeded 25 terabytes in three years—putting a significant stain on the company’s SQL Server 2008.

After implementing Metalogix StoragePoint, Chalcroft immediately saw a dramatic change in the performance of its SQL Server and SharePoint environment. The company also leveraged new capabilities, including the ability to move content to different locations based on file type, size and need. Chalcroft was able to set guidelines on storage use and streamline existing processes. By optimizing its storage space with StoragePoint, Chalcroft was able to save more than £25,000 ($38,000) per year.

Due to SharePoint file size limitations, Chalcroft had been unable to store, access or backup extremely large files greater than 2GB within SharePoint without StoragePoint. Now, the company is able to access all of their large content files, such as 3D models of buildings, through SharePoint. According to Edgson, they are able to provide their customers virtual walkthroughs and rely solely on SharePoint for managing files of any size, which has improved collaboration, productivity and content governance.

“Chalcroft’s challenges with SharePoint content shed a light on an emerging problem for enterprise organizations – network strain due to unmanageable, growing content,” said Steven Murphy, CEO, Metalogix. “Both commercial and government organizations need solutions that ease the storage burden, yet allow users to access critical content whenever and wherever they need it. With Metalogix StoragePoint, we provide customers a breakthrough storage optimization solution that improves the use and performance of SharePoint.”

StoragePoint enables organizations to shrink SharePoint’s SQL databases by up to 95% to slash storage cost, boost upload and download speed and accelerate backups. With StoragePoint, organizations can move unstructured SharePoint data, known as Binary Large Objects (BLOBs), outside of SQL Servers on to affordable external storage tiers, including SAN, NAS or the Cloud.