One of my clients is in the process of modernization of the existing DMS that runs on SharePoint 2013. There are multiple architectural options (SP 2019 on prem, SPO, custom option for Azure cloud) for a new system. What we are trying to figure out if SharePoint can support scale that my client needs.
Currently there are 50+ million documents that are stored in 100+ site collections with thousand+ subsites in each site collection. There are already 150 content databases, more than 40 servers in the farm (just a single environment).
This environment is growing, even with retention/purging process, we are projecting 250 million documents in 10 years. The question is can SharePoint (on prem or online) scale to support this system?
We already considering decoupling metadata and file storage. Where files will be stored in SharePoint and metadata in an "external" database (SQL or NoSQL db).
