Ok, so lets do a little math here.
In SharePoint 2007, you can define only 1 Records Center at a time for official files. A single site collection (including a Records Center) in its own content database might contain somewhere around 1 million documents at a meager average of 55KB per document. That keeps us under the 100GB content database recommended size limit.
1 million documents? Seriously? I suppose you could try to manage multiple records centers but this would get interesting if you actually needed to put something in legal hold in multiple records centers. So for all practical purposes, we were severey limited as to the number of official records that could be supported in the SharePoint 2007 farm.
Enter In-Place Records Management. Excellent! With SharePoint 2010, we will soon have the ability to enable a feature on a site collection that allows us to declare a document as a record IN PLACE!
Suddenly, records center scalability isn't such an issue anymore. Oh yeah, and if you still want to use Records Centers... in SP2010 we will have the ability to define more than just a single Records Center. Also, we gain the option to "Move" a document instead of just copying it to the the Records Center.
So there you have it. Three HUGE improvements to the scalability story of SharePoint 2010!
Remote Blob Storage takes us to a whole new order of magnitude with respect to the number of documents that can be supported in a single content database.
The new SharePoint Search story just got a whole lot better with scale-out for redundancy an performance. Plus we now have FAST for SharePoint which can support BILLIONS of documents in SharePoint.
Finally, In-Place Records Management will support Enterprise Class Records Management solutions that go far beyond the significant limitation in SP2007!
In weeks to come, I'll be dialing in on a few of these technologies. Particularly, I'll be diving in to the deep end on RBS in the very near future!