What to expect when RBS is applied to SharePoint environment

Question

We are currently dealing with a massive content database (2TB!) in our SP2013 farm and are courting RBS as a way to make it more manageable. The majority of the space being used is located on a subsite (not its own site collection), and keeping the files out of SharePoint (i.e. - using a network drive instead) is not an option. Creating a comparable dev environment is also not an option, so I'm looking at a first-time, make-or-break attempt here. As I understand RBS from reading numerous articles, it consists of the following functionality:

• Allows you to specify an alternate location for large files over a certain size
• Said files are still referenced in SharePoint, so the result is seamless to users

Now, that being said, I still have a basic question before I try this. And please keep in mind that I am a total RBS novice here.

What is the expected behavior for the site & files from an admin's perspective once this is turned on via Powershell?

Basically, I've read a ton of stuff on how to enable RBS and roll it back, but I have yet to see anything describe in basic terms what to expect once it's working.

Answer 1

I hate to answer my own question, but I now have one after implementing this in our dev environment. So, for those who are wondering like I was what the practical application of RBS looks like, here is a description:

After setting up filestreaming and RBS, any file uploaded to SharePoint which is over the file size you specified when setting up RBS (say, 500kb) will appear in SharePoint normally. Under the blobstore location you specified (say, D:\Blobstore), there will now be several folders with long GUID names, along with a couple of log folders and a file:

The GUID folders are where your blob files go - each uploaded file is broken up into a series of .000 and .001 files that are very small in size.

The size of the uploaded file will go here instead of the content database, although I'm still a little murky as to whether it temporarily increases your content db size as well. Hopefully someone with more RBS experience will post what to expect long-term.