June 2008 - Posts

• MOSS Scalability and Performance WhitePaper RELEASED!

  Ok.  So I've been waiting for this day for about 3 months now! The culmination of the efforts of several incredible individuals has officially materialized.  ANNOUNCING: Using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server to implement a large-scale content storage scenario with rapid search availability This document is a scalability whitepaper that has been reviewd by Microsoft and posted on TechNet. This white paper presents the key decision points, architecture design and definition, test criteria and results from a scalability and performance test conducted at the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center (MPSC) in Redmond, WA. Don't be discouraged by the 97 pages of content in this document!  It's an easier read than it appears.  Many of the pages are graphs and charts that document the results of the test runs. I just wanted to thank Andy Hopkins for breathing life into this effort and finding the funding that got it done!  If he hadn't brought in KnowledgeLake, I'd still be just messing around with conversion and migration into SharePoint! And I can't forget my good friend Paul Learning.  This guys is amazing folks.  His architecture guidance and his ability to keep us "on track" with Microsoft guidelines were excellent.  Paul is a taxonomy wiz kid and a dedicated professional.  I can't even count how many late nights he worked to bring this effort to life.  Thanks Paul.  As each of us navigate our careers, I expect to stay in touch with you all allong the way. I also want to thank the SharePoint architects and product team members that consulted with us on this effort.  You guys were willing to share your knowledge and I'm a better architect for it.  I'm not sure if any of you read this blog but in case you do, I just wanted you to know that I appreciate that you added your knowledge to the mix.  My hope is that you will continue to see me evangelizing SharePoint Scalability and Search technologies for many years to come. Finally, (can you hear the Emmy exit music?) I wanted to thank KnowledgeLake.  These guys continue to bless me with the opportunities that allow me to further my career and the success of KnowledgeLake.  I don't take this privilege lightly.  Ron Cameron, Bob Bueltmann, Gregg Smith, Chris Caplinger, and Tom Brownell.  I can't imagine working for a better 5 guys.  The servant leadership culture that you all live and breathe is truely appreciated. So, the whitepaper is here... forever added to the ocean of information in TechNet.  My hope is that it helps the community and furthers the image of SharePoint as a highly scalable collaborative and content management platform! Download (.docx): http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120881 TechNet topic: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120901 Download (.doc): http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120890 Download (.pdf): http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120891   Posted Jun 14 2008, 09:50 AM by Russ Houberg with 24 comment(s) Filed under: Scalability, Architecture

• TechEd 2008 Whirlwind - RBS, FAST Search, and Hyper-V

  What can I say about this past week!  It was a great ride and I'm not even talking about The Mummy at Universal!  I spent this last week at TechEd 2008 in Orlando.  It was such an amazing event that I don't even know where to begin!  So I'll start with the facts. Microsoft's new hypervisor technology "Hyper-V" is set to storm onto the scene.  I saw some excellent demos this week.  So good in fact, that I'll probably have Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V running on my laptop and/or my desktop before the week is out.  The big thing I picked up here is that the hypervisor layer has been pushed below the kernal layer so we get a very "close to the metal" connection with system RAM and disk I/O interfaces (SCSI, SATA, HBA, etc).  So the old addage of losing 15-20% performance from virtualization probably goes out the window.  It's probably closer to 3 - 5% now. I also enjoyed talking with the enterprise search product manager from Microsoft.  I look forward to talking with him again regarding how FAST is going to complete the enterprise search story for SharePoint.  With any luck, KnowledgeLake will be in on the ground floor of this new frontier. Lastly, Hao Zhai, a friend of mine and the Commercial Product Manager for KnowledgeLake attended a session on "Unstructured Data Storage".  I totally missed this session so I'm going to plagerize the email he sent me.  This single email signifies the beginning of Microsoft "getting it right" regarding large scale document repository architecture.  Check this out from Hao: Went to a session today on “Unstructured Data Storage”. The presenter confirmed that Microsoft will provide a RBS (Remote Blob Storage) API for SQL 2008 that allows binary data to be stored on “remote” devices. NetApp, EMC and IBM have all officially signed up to write providers for this API, Hitachi and Fujitsu were also mentioned as “in the works”. This is in addition to the FileStream feature where blobs are stored on locally attached NTFS volumes. In both cases, SQL Server will manage the backup/link consistency between DB and blob store. The SharePoint team has committed to leverage FileStream and RBS in O14. To me, this means SharePoint will be able to truly compete head-to-head with Documentum/OnBase/FileNet in terms of storage scalability. This will replace the current “External Blob API” in SharePoint v3 SP1. The current API will continue to exist for backward compatibility for those who built solutions around it while waiting for O14. However, with the SharePoint team committing to implement a new/better solution OOTB leveraging SQL Server 2008, any investment in the current API would have very short-lived relevancy. WOW!  Amazing stuff!  Guess what guys, without blobs in the SQL database, we will be able to take SharePoint into the BILLIONS of documents!  Once remote blob storage bursts onto the scene for SharePoint even simple taxonomies will be able to scale to INSANE numbers of documents!  I CAN'T WAIT!!! Lastly, I want to throw a shout out to the Novell booth in the partner expo center.  Thanks to them, I scored a $1000 travel voucher by winning the Tiger Woods long drive challenge in their booth!  Also, I'm not sure if Rob, Khai, or Mac read this blog or not but I had fun with those guys!  We all did a few round trips into the long drive line trying to one-up each others drive lengths!  It was all friendly competition and I had a BLAST! So there it is.  With any luck we'll all soon be maximizing our massive multi-core servers using Hyper-V to run large SharePoint farms that do blob externalization all while being crawled using FAST search!  So uhh, just a heads up to the Documentum guy who tried to sell his wares during my Birds of a Feather scalability session.... Might want to freshen up that resume.  ;) Posted Jun 14 2008, 09:21 AM by Russ Houberg with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Search, Scalability, Architecture