Enterprise Capacity Solution provides a unified navigation and permission inheritance system allowing you to transparently split your document management system into multiple content databases for optimum performance and disaster recovery.

Native SharePoint features, such as version management, metadata and item-level security, easily tilt your infrastructure selection deliberation towards SharePoint. But there are built-in capacity limitations that could prove to be hazardous if not taken into account beforehand. SharePoint stores all of its data (e.g. files, metadata, site structure) in content databases.

You can assign multiple content databases to a single SharePoint web application, but each site collection (a top-level site with the hierarchy of children sites) must reside in a single database, which can be shared by multiple site collections. When using SharePoint as your primary file storage, the database size grows very rapidly and could easily reach several hundreds of gigabytes within months. You need to keep in mind that all disaster recovery operations, such as backup and restore are performed at a single content database level at least. If the database grows too large, the chances of backup failure grow as well.

It is possible to create a system made up out of a combination of multiple site collections. Unfortunately, there are several key features that are not shared across site collections.