Soarsoft Africa releases Metalogix StoragePoint

Established as SharePoint's top-selling storage optimisation product, the new release expands StoragePoint's range of capabilities to include automated backup, either on-premises or in the cloud, and the ability to granularly restore lost content all the way down to the document level.

Says Chris Hathaway, director of Soarsoft Africa: "It is essential for organisations of all sizes to ensure that a SharePoint backup and recovery strategy is in place. This becomes even more critical as the amount of data and importance of the content increases with the wider adoption of SharePoint as a Document Management and Collaboration solution for the enterprise. StoragePoint is often already required or in place to archive and off-load content from the database and by automating your backup and recovery in the same platform, there are significant gains in efficiency and over all simplification of the platform. Furthermore, it caters to those organisations that leverage Cloud Storage and Backup Infrastructure, ensuring the solution is aligned with these cloud strategies."

Organisations must now manage an average of 1 Terabyte (TB) of content within SharePoint environments and that content is nearly doubling every year. Due to this dramatic growth and SharePoint's ascension as a mission-critical content management and collaboration platform, there is increasing pressure on organisations to develop a cohesive strategy for storing terabytes of content and achieving fast backup and recovery. Organisations have realised that existing storage and backup methods can no longer meet the stricter Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements for data loss and recovery. For example, without StoragePoint, it can take up to eight hours to backup 1TB of content. With StoragePoint, it can be accomplished in minutes.

StoragePoint 4.2 provides a comprehensive approach for Binary Large Object (BLOB) storage, SharePoint backup and recovery, all of which can be accessed directly within a single user interface in the SharePoint central administration. StoragePoint uses Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) technology to offload the unstructured content such as Office documents and rich media files - known as BLOBs - from SQL Server to more appropriate and cheaper storage tiers.

Externalising BLOBs shrinks content databases by up to 95% and allows databases to be automatically and continuously backed up in mere minutes. The product also provides granular, item-level restore capabilities for lost, deleted or corrupted content. StoragePoint enables these breakthrough capabilities for any version of SharePoint and is the first to do so for SharePoint 2013.

"Our customers have routinely inquired about improving their lengthy backup times and reducing the time it takes to respond to a user losing a document or folder," says Steven Murphy, CEO, Metalogix. "We developed StoragePoint 4.2 to provide customers a simple way to address their SharePoint storage, backup and recovery needs. Within one familiar user interface, SharePoint administrators and IT professionals can quickly and easily backup and restore content in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours or days. StoragePoint 4.2 is a game-changer for SharePoint backup and recovery that will streamline these processes and improve productivity throughout an organisation."

By using StoragePoint 4.2, organisations will no longer have to rely on time-consuming backup processes with SQL Backup or a central backup and recovery team to handle lost item requests. Additionally, the product introduces support for backup to the cloud, which will help further drive down storage costs. There are also new features that address event-based retention support for EMC Centera and synchronisation between SharePoint information management and external storage retention policies.

As part of the product release, Metalogix has introduced StoragePoint Express, which gives organisations the chance to use the product at no cost for up to 200 Gigabytes (GB) of content. StoragePoint Express features the RBS capabilities that have established StoragePoint as the market-leader for SharePoint storage optimisation and the new automated backup features.

"StoragePoint has a rich history of setting trends within the SharePoint industry and the introduction of StoragePoint Express continues this tradition," says Jignesh Shah, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Metalogix. "By offering up to 200GB for free, we are providing a unique opportunity to use our product risk-free and experience its breakthrough ability to improve SharePoint performance, slash SharePoint storage costs and reduce the time it takes to backup and recover SharePoint content."