Articles about Scaling SharePoint to Large Content Database Capacity

Today we announced new scalability limits for SharePoint content databases. SharePoint 2010 implementations can make use of scale up and scale out. Scale up means increasing hardware resources available so that the software can do more. Scale out means increasing the number of servers that you are loading up and for SharePoint this also means increasing the number of SharePoint Content Databases that you work with.

With the new content database capacity limits we have guidance for scaling up with SharePoint and using more hardware resources:

• SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits (updated July 8th, 2011)
• Managing Multi-Terabyte Content Databases with Microsoft^® SharePoint^® 2010 by Bill Baer
• Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration
• Scale-out Collaboration Sites
• TechNet SharePoint Performance and Capacity Management Section

It's also important to note that using an RBS provider, whether the Microsoft one or a third party one, does not increase the data size scalability of SharePoint. All the limits numbers apply whether your data is all in SQL Server or if BLOBs are moved out using an RBS povider.