Understanding Microsoft Specifications for Designing a SharePoint Farm

June 1, 2012

In the eighth part of his SharePoint 2010 series, Robert Schifreen explains how he found that reading between the lines is an essential part of understanding Microsoft’s approach to specifications. His full account is relayed in, “Designing a SharePoint Farm: Tiers before Bedtime.” Schifreen decided on the three-tier model as the best architecture for performance in his farm: the first tier for SharePoint server IIS processes, the second tier for three more SharePoint servers doing all non-IIS things, and the third tier for an SQL Server.

Schifreen goes on to explain:

Having decided on a farm architecture, we also needed to think about the storage architecture too. The web, and especially TechNet, is full of warnings that storage can be the major bottleneck, and that it’s best to split the major data paths across separate physical drives. We originally drew up a plan that saw us using around 20 separate drive volumes on the SQL server, to include content databases, non-content databases, search indexes, transaction logs, tempdb, and so on.

But after further research, the team came up with a different method:

A subsequent session with SharePoint 911 convinced us that this was not a wise move because it would be too difficult to manage. Also, our SAN should be able to take care of ironing out any storage bottlenecks anyway. So we decided to start off with a couple of 1.6TB volumes, to put all the databases on those, and then to request further volumes from our SAN people as and when required. Moving a database from one volume to another, within the same SQL server, is relatively painless.

Overall, the post provides some practical insight into the design process. While SharePoint is a powerful and ubiquitous program, Schifreen points out that the data limits are a little deceiving as there are limitations with 1.6 terabytes. To round out your SharePoint system, consider a third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise.

Here you can read about the cost-efficient solution:

Company knowledge and the information in the Cloud are constantly growing. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze web client is the driving force behind the information pairing. It makes the access to knowledge user-friendly and easy. Correlations and links are semantically recognized and displayed. This provides your employees with a flexible, dynamic, yet still easy to use platform that grows with you. This is the professional implementation of Unified Information Access.

Navigate to http://www.mindbreeze.com/ to learn more.

Philip West, June 1, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.