SharePoint 2010 announced a major storage upgrade and provided instruction for improved data size scaling for the program, in a blog post July 6.

"By defining specific requirements for large data storage in SharePoint, Microsoft is able to increase the supported limits for data storage in SharePoint," according to the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) post.

According to the company, the storage limit has increased from 200GB to 4TB, when certain requirements are followed. 

It can now support an "unlimited" content database size for document archive scenarios, as well, when best practices and some restrictions are followed. If the new guidance factors for building supportable large scale systems are not followed, however, then the lower supportability limit applies, said Microsoft.

The best practice guidance is outlined fully in the Microsoft blog post and will be particularly helpful for customers with large implementations. 

Documents in SharePoint document libraries are BLOBs, or binary large object data. As part of the storage changes, BLOBs don't have to be stored on the same machine as the SQL Server. The SQL Server FILESTREAM Remote BLOB Storage provider is now supported for use with SharePoint. This enables BLOB storage on a less expensive, iSCSI-connected NAS disk.

SharePoint users who already moved BLOBs to a remote BLOB storage provider--in an effort to avoid the 200 GB limit--are now required to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 SP1 and follow the new guidance for the total size, said Microsoft. It's also possible the deployment could fall outside of the new and old limits, in which case SharePoint users would have to request a "supportability review," from Microsoft.

For more:
- see the SharePoint blog post 

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