SharePoint as an alternative to large volumes of file shares? Dreaming?

We've been on SharePoint 2007 for close to 2 years now. We find it's a great CMS that helps us centralize project documents and colaborate with less duplication and confusion. The custom list feature offers a quick and dirty alternative to custom form and developed sql solutions sometimes.

That said, we still have over 100 Terrabytes of files shares with documents dating far back to the beginning of time outside of SharePoint.

As we look forward to smarter, faster and bigger Network FileSystems...

(1)What realistic role should SharePoint play?

(2) How reliable can SharePoint be as a seemless place to store documents? I mean, will we be able to save/retrieve documents to sharepoint from all popular clients without having to open sharepoint?

Part of why I ask ... A few months ago as part of another project, we attempted to use SharePoint 2007 like a file share.. attempting to set up a Windows drive map and UNC path and/or WebDAV. Our findings were that not every client (XP, Vista, 7, Mac. IX, etc) plays nice with UNC, WEBDAV and drive mappings. Not surprised. Does this change significantly looking ahead to future sharepoint releases?

(3) Are there documents that have no business in SharePoint? Databases? Executables? propietary logs? What about documents where we expect lots for row level IO from potentially multiple users?

(4) How many customers would you say are seriously looking at SharePoint as a significant alternative to开发者_如何学JAVA file shares? I understand SharePoint DBs should not exceed 100g - so we have a DB for every site collection. But we have over 100T of potential content. If there are customers seriously looking to go this way - what might there archetecture look like? Blob storage outside of SQL? EBS vs RBS? Who are the major players that offer this and will SharePoint ever offer this natively? EMC? StoragePoint? who else? EBS vs RBS?

(5) What about performance and content indexing concerns?

Thanks in Advance.

If you're seriously consider BLOB storage and SharePoint, then your should look into Remote Blob Storage. See Overview of Remote BLOB Storage. Besides the free FILESTRAM based provider, there are 3rd party providers of RBS that can place the BLOB on SANs like the EMC one.

Metalogix's StoragePoint has an offering called FileShare Librarian that may be the answer you are looking for, it will quickly create the file structure and permissions in SharePoint, while leaving the BLOB's externalized. There is all FileShare Migration Manager for a full fidelity migration, you can still externalize the blobs to EMC with StoragePoint.