SharePoint 2010 Won't Go Easy On Data Storage

SharePoint 2010 is here, and that's a good thing. Unless, that is, you're hoping to slim down your company's data storage requirements.Over the past decade, SharePoint has gone through a remakable evolution from the "poor man's portal" to social networking on steroids. That's right, SharePoint 2010 is absolutely packed with features you'd expect from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Delicious, or Amazon.com.

That's wonderful news in a number of ways. First, it gives SMBs a handle on the social networking tools that employees now expect -- and demand -- to use in the workplace, too. You get the same functionality, plus all of the control, privacy, and security you won't get from the usual suspects.

Second, you can be sure this will drive an explosion in new uses for SharePoint sites, content repositories, wikis and blogs -- you name it. If you're already using SharePoint to encourage collaboration and to capture knowledge, get ready to see a lot more of the same.

Now the bad news. Many companies are already wrestling with SharePoint's habit of consuming as much storage as you they can throw at it. SharePoint 2010 will almost certainly make the problem even worse.

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a CIO at a midsized company about how his IT organization's storage needs have changed. He replied that data growth wasn't really a big issue, with one massive exception: SharePoint.

All of those user-generated sites, and all of the related content, was eating up storage faster than his IT department could provision it. It's a trend that took them by surprise, and now they're scrambling to get on top of it.

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Maybe you're already using SharePoint and having a similar problem. Or maybe you're just getting ready to start using SharePoint, and the problem hasn't even occurred to you.

Either way, consider this a fair warning: SharePoint 2010 is good for a lot of things. But helping your company cut its data-storage requirements is not one of them. If you want to make the most out of what SharePoint has to offer, be sure to take a realistic position towards how it will affect your storage planning and purchasing decisions.