Shredded storage, one of the biggest improvements of with the new version of SharePoint Server 2013. What’s actually his goal? His goal is to limit the size of storage required for SharePoint by recording the differential elements.
Storage Bill Baer
A concrete example. On SharePoint 2010 when I upload a document of 10 MB size and activate versioning on that Document Library; each change on that document required a complete record of that document on our database.
- 1 document of 10 MB with 10 versions means on our database 100 MB storage
- 1 document of 100 MB with 10 versions means on our database 1GB storage
So on SharePoint 2013? I can create the same document library, turn on versioning, I can change many time the document, only the updates are added on our storage.
Btw; Cobalt still sits between the client and the web server whereas shredded storage sits between the web server and the database server. Shredded storage is activated by default, it’s active even without versioning turned on.. ( Thanks to Thomas Vochten )
We can do tests and see if it’s really working. I have 2 Virtual Machines; one hosting SharePoint 2010 and another one hosting SharePoint 2013. I’ve added a content database of 20 MB on each Web Application of my environments (SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010) and I’ve created a Document Library on each content database.
Shredded Storage
The next test is to create a new Word Document with a few pictures and 100 words… My word document is now large enough and has the size of 4MB. We are going to add this on each Document Library on SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010.
Shredded Storage
You can see that adding the same document on each Document Library has the same effect. The document Content Database has been improved by the same value 8623 Ko.
Nothing exceptional. But actually this new feature plays his role on versioning. I’m going to take the same document and create 10 versions on SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 only by adding a new line on each version.
Shredded Storage
WOW only “0” (zero)!!!
You will also see that saving the document on SharePoint 2013 is very fast and on SharePoint 2010 it takes a few seconds.
We can conclude that the Shredded storage is a powerful new feature on SharePoint 2013 when versioning is used on lists, document library’s … The storage will not improve by versioning and the network will not be overlapped and used by SharePoint Server. We will gain Storage and Performance!
This can be used as example for potential clients that want to use SharePoint but are scared about storage.