SharePoint 2013 Shredded Storage

Shredded Storage only saves the bits which are changed in the document are saved to the database. Which means if a user is modified the document, then before saving the file to database it will detect the changes (as we all know since office 2007 format the office data saved in XML format) by comparing XML data and save only the changed data. So, if a file size is 2MB and it has 5 versions then the total size will be less than 10MB. This way we can save huge amount of size in databases in real time environments for medium and large scale FARMs.

By default Shredded Storage feature is turned on (out of the box feature). As it is a default feature it will work with RBS (Remote Blob Storage) as well without any issues. By using these features we can solve problems which we are facing today because of heavy databases for site collections and web applications.

File Save Process in SharePoint 2010:

File Save Process in SharePoint 2013:

SharePoint 2013 Shredded Storage Enable

By default shredded storage is enabled. We can enable or disable the shredded storage at web application level or site level. We can enable the shredded storage by using web service, FileOperationSettings property of the web application. We have three options for the shredded storage, UseWebSetting,AlwaysDirectToShredded, NeverDirectToShredded. Shredded storage is independent from RBS. We can use RBS with or without using shredded storage.    

Diff .RBS [Remote Blob Storage] with Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013

Shredded Storage and RBS complement each other. Shredded Storage reduces network and storage I/O when saving document edits. And RBS reduces Content Database size, improves upload and download speed, and accelerates backup/restore operations. Following the guidelines above will help you get the most out of RBS and Shredded Storage.

There is a lot of misinformation currently floating around about Shredded Storage and RBS in SharePoint 2013. The reality is that neither replaces the other.

In SharePoint Server 2013, Shredded Storage and RBS coexist without issue.  Shredded Storage is a single file broken down into smaller “chunks” and stored within the SharePoint Content Database.  With RBS in place, the smaller “chunks” will be externalized rather than a single file.  Regardless of shredding, the end result is the same: BLOBs are stored outside of SharePoint Content Databases.

Pros of using Shredded Storage -

1. Shredded Storage Improves the I/O performance - In SharePoint 2010 in order to save the changes to a document or lets say add a new version of a document, the original file is first read from the database server by the Web Server(WFE) and then it merges the document with Changes.The file is then sent back to the database server for storage.In this process results in a large amount of network traffic between the WFE and the database server.
In SharePoint 2013 however, when a Client updates a file, only the shredded BLOB that corresponds to the change is updated.This update occurs on the database server as opposed to the Web server(WFE) thus reducing huge network traffic and Improving File IO Operations.

2. Reduce Storage with Document Versioning - With Changes only being saved as “Changed Blobs” and not the entire document with the Changes as new Version,Shredded Storage helps Save a lot of Storage space and lowers the amount of storage required for storing files that are available in SharePoint.

3. Microsoft Office 2013 is not required for Shredded Storage to work - any version of Office which accesses files via the DAV or the FSSHTTP protocol will benefit from this.

4. Supports any File Formats – Shredded Storage not only apply to Microsoft Office file formats - any file format stored on SharePoint 2013 servers which is edited/updated by end users will benefit from Shredded Storage.

Corns of using Shredded Storage -

1. Shredded storage is a per document feature.So if two Copies of the exactly same document is stored in two different libraries, these two documents will still have their own set of shreds which will take up twice the space of each individual document.

SharePoint 2010 storage and retrieval

With SharePoint 2010, when the end user updates the document, only the changes used to be send back over MS-FSSHHTTP and the Web Server used to load the complete BLOB from database and updates the parts in it and stores the updated BLOB into Database again.

 SharePoint 2010 way of document changes are explained below

The problem with the above approach is there is overload on WFEs even when a portion of the document changed.

Now we will see how Shredded storage with SharePoint 2013 addressed the above problem

Shredded Storage:

Shredded Storage is a new data platform improvement provided with SharePoint 2013 related to the management of large binary objects.

The files are broken into pieces and stored as multiple BLOBs instead of a single BLOB. On update only the related chunks will get updated on SQL.

Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 optimizes I/O and provides smoother I/O patterns when compared to prior versions of SharePoint Products, and it provides storage cost benefits under conditions where historical versioning is widely used and implemented.

By default, Shredded Storage partitions data across a 64 KB boundary based on the FileWriteChunkSize property, which is configurable up to a maximum partition size of 2 GB. 2 GB is also representative of the maximum file size supported by SharePoint 2013.

Shredded storage offers the benefits like memory(content db) optimization and File I/O optimization

RBS and Shredded Storage

Remote Blob Storage (RBS) was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and continues to exist in 2013. RBS is best used to push relatively large files from being contained directly in the SharePoint content database(s) out into an actual file system.

The Blob threshold can be adjusted by “MinimumBlobStorageSize “setting which controls minimum size of files to move to RBS by the Management Shell on SharePoint server.

Let us think about both RBS and Shredded Storag

1  RBS works best with larger blobs

2. Shredded Storage slices larger blobs into a lot of very small blobs