Of course, 11 servers aren’t required to run SharePoint… in fact, many of my customers operate with much less and are quite happy. However, those customers aren’t necessarily supporting global deployments with tens-of-thousands of users who’s access to the information stored in SharePoint is critical to making the business run. When keeping any system up is of paramount importance, fault tolerance, testing, and clearly defined boundaries and deployment processes are of almost equal importance.

While I don’t necessarily expect that everyone in the world will be able or interested in doing what I suggest, my goal is less to give a directive and more to inspire thought. I hope that when people read the blog entry you’re referencing they think about what their needs are against those listed and make the decision that is best for them…. and the entry intentionally has enough information to stir those thoughts and help people consciously make those decisions.

Ultimately, I prefer not to think in terms of “right” and “wrong”… and so to that end, not doing the “minimal” infrastructure is certainly not wrong. Rather, there are benefits and trade-offs to every decision that is made, and all too often people make the decision without considering or accepting the trade-offs of that decision.

I hope that when people finish reading my blog they don’t leave thinking they’re required to do something a certain way… but have enough information to understand why they might or might not need to.

Thanks for the read!