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Why Use DriveSight?
Enterprise Search is a wildly popular feature of MOSS, and organizations are understandably enthusiastic about using SharePoint to search their large network files shares. As consultants, we're often asked to design an infrastructure to support these requirements, but predicting the size of the resulting indexes and Search Databases has been a challenge.
Most of us are aware of the "20% thumb rule" or the like, where we multiply the size of the external content source by some percentage to estimate the size of the index and the SSP Search database. Thumb rules are generally fine when we're looking at small deployments, but when we're capacity planning for large-scale enterprise farms, any thumb rule can result in a very large margin of error - sometimes by hundreds of gigabytes, or even terabytes.
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Estimate too small, and the solution doesn't work; estimate too large, and the client is forced to pay for expensive enterprise storage solutions that they don't need. The trick is to figure out how much of the content source can actually be indexed by SharePoint. To do that, we need to know what's actually on the drive - both in terms of the types of files and their size. DriveSight does this in a way that would otherwise take an extraordinary amount of time.
Another request that our clients frequently have is to upload large drives or folders directly into SharePoint document libraries. Setting aside the discussion around whether or not this is always a good idea, the fact remains that if you're going to upload a large amount of files into SharePoint, it's important to understand what's there.
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SharePoint maintains a list of file types that are blocked, and by default this list is quite extensive. It may well be that a significant percentage of the files the client intends to upload are files that are on this list. Or, it may be that while the client is focused on the benefits (versioning, workflow, etc.) of moving thousands of documents from a file share into document libraries, they may not be considering the impact of uploading all of the other non-document file types that reside on that drive.
Executables, drawings, pictures, archives, audio, and video files are examples of file types aren't typically very collaborative in nature, and thus don't usually benefit from long-term storage in SharePoint. That's not to say that clients shouldn't necessarily upload these types of files, but they should at least be aware of impact so that they can make an informed decision before allocating the storage necessary to accommodate it.
SharePoint Architects are well aware that although the cost for disk space has come down significantly over the past years, the cost-per-megabyte for enterprise-class storage is still very expensive, particularly in the context of SharePoint farm topologies. Large SharePoint farms generally rely upon highly available, fully backed up and sometimes globally replicated databases. Expensive RAID or SAN solutions are the norm, and every gigabyte matters.
In these scenarios, guessing just isn't good enough. With DriveSight, you don't have to.
Download DriveSight
For more information regarding SharePoint Capacity Planning for Search. visit Microsoft:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262574.aspx
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