Belated Announcement: SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper now available
My name is Paul Learning, a Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in SharePoint deployments, and it's with great excitement and pride that I announce the release of the SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper. This 90+ page whitepaper is based on a lot of hard work, dedication, and collaboration from a team of exceptional individuals; it documents the architectural design considerations and performance characteristics of a real-world, large-scale SharePoint lab implementation containing around 50 million content items, and reflects both “scale-up” and “scale-out” scenarios.
The hardware rig was provided by Fujitsu and included blade servers, rack servers, and an Eternus 4000 SAN with 10 TB of storage space. Special thanks to Greg Reuter, Jeff DeCarlo, and Brett Pierce from Fujitsu!
KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was responsible for blasting 50 million content items into SharePoint; they also played a key role in defining the architecture, creating and executing the system tests, and gathering the massive results. KnowlegeLake was ultimately able to use their load tool to send 50 million documents into SharePoint at a peak rate of over 7 million documents per day! Very special thanks to Russ Houberg, Gregg Smith, Bob Bueltmann, Chuck Nash, and Ron Cameron from KnowledgeLake!
Of course, I simply can’t forget to mention all the incredible Microsoft people, who assisted in making this effort a success. First and foremost, our fearless leader, Andy Hopkins, who led the effort from start to finish and constantly amazed me with his enthusiasm and perseverance. I was equally impressed with Andy’s ability to wordsmith while editing our whitepaper. Next comes the long list of other exceptional individuals who stepped up to help out: Steve Peschka, Mike Taghizadeh, Thomas Rizzo, Ryan Duguid, Joel Oleson, Mitch Prince, Doron Bar-Caspi, Simon Skaria, Ambrose Treacy, Sid Shah, Grant Morisette, and Mitch Powers.
I could never have completed this project without the generous help of the people mentioned above. It was truly a collaborative team effort!
In addition to the project that resulted in the Scalability and Performance whitepaper, the KnowledgeLake folks and I were recently involved in another very challenging proof-of-concept for a large pharmaceutical company, which represented a large-scale SharePoint implementation containing 40 TB of content (about 75 million content items) spread across two SharePoint farms.
I am absolutely confident that after these two projects, we’ve finally answered the looming question, "Can SharePoint scale?" with a resounding, "Yes!"
I hope that you'll find this whitepaper beneficial in designing your SharePoint implementations whether small, medium, or large-scale. You can open or download the appropriate format of the whitepaper from the links below. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment on this blog entry.
Paul J. Learning
Senior Consultant, Microsoft Consulting Services
