NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint
Lets you improve SharePoint scalability and reduce storage costs

NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint software enables you to monitor and manage your growing Microsoft SharePoint Server environment across your entire enterprise. Using the clustered Data ONTAP operating system, you can perform routine maintenance and upgrades without disrupting storage operations. Our deep integration with AvePoint DocAve software lets you deploy an integrated platform that supports end-to-end SharePoint storage, management, monitoring, and deployment of governance policies.

SnapManager software enables automatic placement of files and BLOBs on SMB (CIFS) shares outside of the content database to improve the scalability of large SharePoint deployments.

Back up SharePoint Server data in minutes, and recover at any granularity from individual documents up to an entire SharePoint farm within minutes, from local or remote backups. SnapManager automates backup and restore of Nintex workflows, and FAST search information and certificates.

SnapManager and SnapMirror software together can simplify remote replication of SharePoint data, enabling a reliable disaster-recovery strategy.

Key Benefits

• Reduce Operational Costs
  Leverage our centralized data management capabilities to simplify and optimize SharePoint data storage according to business requirements.
• Optimize Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
  Perform storage maintenance, hardware lifecycle operations, and software upgrades without interrupting your business. Perform granular restore and clone restore for test/development scenarios or recover your entire SharePoint environment in minutes versus hours or days.
• Increase Productivity
  Streamline data management and automate routine tasks so administrators can spend less time performing maintenance and more time on highvalue/ROI tasks.

Support rapidly growing SharePoint environments while managing IT resources efficiently

The scope, scale, and complexity of today’s data-driven world create new demands for agility in the data center. As Microsoft SharePoint Server adoption has increased, so has the complexity of many SharePoint deployments. SharePoint is now considered a platform delivering business-critical services to organizations using web portals and extranets, enterprise content management, workflow, search, and enterprise social networking.

In many SharePoint environments, storage efficiency and scalability can be significant issues. Scaling users and storage in addition to changing or upgrading hardware or software can interrupt business operations, reducing the availability of critical SharePoint data. Managing and protecting SharePoint data can also be time consuming and complex, significantly increasing administration overhead. For IT managers and SharePoint administrators, this development poses a number of challenges:

• Cost-effectively meeting SLAs based on increasing business requirements
• Managing storage and performance for rapidly growing SharePoint Server farms
• Seamlessly scaling SharePoint deployments to manage large data files and more users
• Protecting SharePoint data efficiently
• Meeting archive, compliance, and governance requirements

To address these challenges, you need an approach that focuses on storing and managing your SharePoint data more efficiently and economically while increasing the availability of your enterprise collaboration environment. You also need an agile storage infrastructure that can readily and cost effectively scale to keep pace with the evolving needs of your business.

NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint

With NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint (SMSP), you get a powerful combination of manageability, efficiency, data protection, and scalability for various workloads within the SharePoint platform, including collaboration portals, document repositories, workflows, and Internet sites based on Microsoft SharePoint Server. SnapManager enables you to externalize and store unstructured binary large objects (BLOBs) on NetApp Server Message Block (SMB) shares, also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS) storage, outside of SQL Server, thereby reducing SQL database size.

Our storage solutions allow your IT staff to monitor the health of and manage SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013 farms across the enterprise from a centralized location. With NetApp, you can easily provision additional storage as needed without affecting your SharePoint users. Our integrated solutions also help you to automate data protection, including data backup leveraging NetApp Snapshot technology and replication for disaster recovery purposes using NetApp SnapMirror technology.

Tight integration of SnapManager Storage Manager’s Remote BLOB Storage Provider with Microsoft technologies means increased scalability of your SharePoint environment by storing and managing BLOB data on NetApp SMB (CIFS) shares, outside the Microsoft SQL Server database.

Reduce storage costs

When you consolidate SharePoint Server data onto NetApp storage, you save money by improving storage utilization and simplifying data management. With NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint Server, you can:

• Save money through space-efficient storage and deduplication of redundant SharePoint data.
• Streamline data and storage management of SharePoint Server farms across your enterprise.
• Increase IT productivity by automating various data management and protection functions.
• Optimize your resources through a tiered storage strategy supported by the NetApp Unified Storage Architecture that enables SMB-based data on NAS and SAN data to reside on a single NetApp storage system.
• Reduce costs by externalizing BLOB files from expensive primary storage to NetApp SMB/CIFS shares using SnapManager for SharePoint Storage Manager.
• Archive SharePoint data to less expensive SATA storage for comprehensive hierarchical storage management using SnapManager for SharePoint Archive Manager.
• Utilize another key capability, Connector, to access and manage unstructured SMB/CIFS file share data through SharePoint without having to import the data into SharePoint content databases.

Through policy-based data management, SnapManager enables you to externalize BLOBs based on preconfigured rules onto SMB shares that use lower-cost SATA storage. With Storage Manager, you have the flexibility to move files by group, site collection, file type, size, or access time in real time, when users upload files or on a schedule, to NetApp SMB/CIFS shares.

To further reduce costs and increase efficiency, our SharePoint storage solutions support virtualized IT environments, including Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V and VMware vSphere as well as private cloud implementations, to shrink your overall physical infrastructure footprint and provide integrated management, automation, and self-provisioning capability.

Scale seamlessly

The combination of SnapManager for SharePoint and the clustered Data ONTAP operating system, NetApp’s leading storage operating system, means that as business requirements change, your SharePoint infrastructure is agile and can be adjusted dynamically and seamlessly. Improve service levels by redeploying or adding SharePoint workloads without interrupting business. SnapManager support for clustered Data ONTAP enables nondisruptive operations during your infrastructure maintenance and upgrades with seamless cluster failover capabilities in the storage subsystem.

With clustered Data ONTAP you will not experience data outages during storage system maintenance, upgrades, resizing of FlexVol volumes, load rebalancing, or even volume movement within a virtual server. Maintain access to all of your data for the duration of its life. Clustered Data ONTAP offers a highly flexible infrastructure that can readily support changing business requirements with optimized resource utilization, which in turn can help you reduce infrastructure costs.

Using Storage Manager, you can easily move and store large unstructured data files outside of the SQL Server database using External BLOB Storage or Remote BLOB Storage, in real time or on a schedule. These large unstructured data files are stored on less expensive SATA disk–based SMB shares on NetApp storage system. As a result, you can store and manage large data files more efficiently while achieving seamless scaling of your SharePoint environment. The less expensive SMB shares can also help you to lower the overall cost of your SharePoint storage.

Improve manageability

You can easily connect existing file shares with SharePoint using the Connector module, which enables users to manage connected data using SharePoint. With Archive Manager, you can complete the data management cycle by automatically retiring data from SharePoint after it reaches specified archive parameters.

The automated discovery feature of SnapManager for SharePoint enables you to easily set up, monitor, and manage the growth of SharePoint Server farms across your enterprise. And with the Health Analyzer, you can easily scan individual SharePoint servers or entire farms to check the overall configuration, including software prerequisite checks, network, access management, and Windows Server settings. NetApp provides an agile storage infrastructure that enables you to quickly provision additional storage resources without affecting SharePoint users. Further, with built-in role-based access controls, you can easily manage the administration of multiple users with multiple roles through the SnapManager management console. With NetApp you have the flexibility and automation needed to intelligently manage your SharePoint data.

SnapManager is tightly integrated with the AvePoint DocAve platform, which extends the management capabilities of our comprehensive SharePoint solution. A highly intuitive graphical user interface enables centralized policy-based management of multiple SharePoint farms and automates routine data management tasks such as backup, recovery, and moving data to SMB storage. You can develop custom scripts with an SMSP library of Windows PowerShell™ cmdlets and AvePoint DocAve SDKs to provide application extensibility and further enhance manageability.

Safeguard SharePoint data

Eliminate exposure to data loss by performing frequent and automated backups with our fast Snapshot technology. SnapManager takes only seconds to minutes to perform complete farm- and item-level backups while significantly minimizing the required disk space. This dramatically reduces backup window times and enables you to make more frequent and complete backups. Up to 255 Snapshot copies per volume can be kept online at any one time with negligible performance impact. With SnapManager for SharePoint, FAST content SSA, FAST search server farms, and FAST certificates can be automatically backed up and restored.

With SnapManager, you can achieve nondisruptive operations as you plan and implement a highly reliable disaster recovery strategy for your SharePoint Server data. By adding NetApp SnapMirror replication technology, you can simplify remote replication of SharePoint Server data so that it can be recovered rapidly in the event of a disaster.

With support for multi-tenancy, customers can utilize functionality that Data ONTAP offers to provide data compartmentalization for all tenants, with each granted access only to its designated storage container. Rich support based on Windows PowerShell for both Data ONTAP and NetApp integrated backup empowers administrators to develop appropriate workflows that support the needs of your multi-tenant environment. In addition, clustered Data ONTAP provides storage quality of service (QoS) workload management using policies that specify a throughput limit, defined in terms of IOPS or MB/sec. This optimizes SharePoint Server performance consistently without being affected by other application workloads or tenants.

Achieve fast, granular recovery of SharePoint Server data

With SnapManager, you can recover SharePoint Server data in minutes, not hours or days, benefiting from one of the fastest backup and recovery solutions available. SnapManager also gives you the flexibility to recover and restore an entire SharePoint farm, site collection, sites, subsites, individual documents, and document versions as needed— all within minutes. You can also choose to restore to an alternate SharePoint farm. In addition, Nintex, NewsGator, and KnowledgeLake workflows are protected.

Meet archive and compliance requirements

Our archive and compliance solutions help you further reduce storage costs with the use of low-cost, disk-based long-term storage. You can archive data to SnapLock devices for compliance while lowering SharePoint storage expense for primary storage. We also offer encryption solutions that help reduce the risk of inadvertent or malicious alteration of your SharePoint Server data in both the database and remote BLOB storage. With the addition of SnapVault software, you can store weeks, months, or even years of backups on less expensive secondary storage while substantially reducing disk capacity requirements. The Archive Manager can also archive data from SharePoint sites using a policy-based engine for long-term storage on less expensive secondary NetApp storage devices.

Extend your solution with AvePoint DocAve integration

You can combine the power of the DocAve software platform with NetApp storage and data management for an integrated platform that supports endto-end SharePoint storage, management, monitoring, and deployment of governance policies. This integrated platform enables you to:

• Perform end-to-end management of global SharePoint deployments with simplified deployment, monitoring, and enforcement of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and 2013 governance policies.
• Manage development, test, and production farm administration with ease and govern solution deployment with DocAve application lifecycle management tools.
• Obtain comprehensive real-time intelligence about your SharePoint environment, including operations, performance, and content usage.
• Simplify your content migration from multiple legacy systems to SharePoint Server.
• Enforce security, compliance, and retention for business content.

SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint.

Partner for success

NetApp Professional Services for Microsoft Applications offers a wide range of services, including SharePoint Server implementation on the NetApp storage platform, disaster recovery, and high availability, as well as custom services to help customers with their SharePoint Server deployment. To meet your interoperability and performance needs, we collaborate closely with Microsoft on key product integration efforts, including performance testing, product validation, and joint development. In fact, NetApp was recently recognized as the Microsoft Partner of the Year for server solutions. NetApp Global Support and our extensive partner network can provide expert help to assist you in planning and implementing an efficient and reliable storage and data management solution for your SharePoint Server environment.

You can find out more about the NetApp agile storage infrastructure at your local Microsoft Technology Center (MTC). There, you will see firsthand how the combination of Microsoft and our hardware, software, and services provides a resilient foundation for even the most demanding enterprise collaboration environment. Contact your NetApp sales representative or your NetApp reseller to arrange a visit to your local MTC.

Documentation:

Download the NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint Datasheet (.PDF)