I've ask yesterday about Document Libraries limits and the only thing that we have certain is that Microsoft recommends Content Databases <= 200gb.
I'm facing a situation here where I'm setting up a Document Center and a Record Center for archiving. The estimated volume is around 450gb per month.
My question is... How can I manage all those Content Databases to get close to 200gb limits recommended up by Microsoft?
Is it possible?
SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 does support content databases up to 4TB, if upgrading to Service Pack 1 is one of the things available in your SharePoint road map, let's do it to utilize maximum its capability.
I've found a white paper "Managing Multi-Terabyte Content Databases with SharePoint 2010" written by MCM, Sr. Technical Product Manager Bill Baer. In this white paper, he explains how to manage large content databases in Microsoft SharePoint 2010. The paper discusses content databases in three size ranges: up to 200 gigabytes (GB), 200 GB-4 terabytes (TB), and larger than 4 TB. These ranges have different limitations, recommended architectures, and operational requirements. The paper provides detailed guidance for capacity management, performance, data protection, and maintenance of large content databases.
Hope this document helps you much.
T.s
That limit isn't a hard limit, it's just a recommendation based on the difficulty of SQL operations like backup / restore. You can have multi TB content databases if you want to and if your SQL environment can handle it. I would suggest a netapp type SAN with dedupping and fast backups connected to a very beefy SQL cluster.
It's hard to say how to break up your content since I am unfamilar with your business structure, but I have had good success of having each site collection in it's own database. So if you could break out your content into different site collections (maybe one per month??), then I think you could easily handle large ammounts of data.
Also, utilizing Remote Blob Storage (RBS) could be a great solution to keeping your content DB's really small.
