| As high performance, highly available Intel and AMD-based Microsoft Windows 2000 and .NET servers become the norm in the Enterprise Data Center, the question of which hardware vendor to choose for your SharePoint Portal Server implementation seems to become somewhat moot. Nearly every top tier server manufacturer provides a sound product at a reasonable price-point, offering comparable performance metrics with similar post-sales support options. Nearly all of them offer specialized high-availability features like hot plug hard disk drives, RAID Array hard disk drive controllers capable of supporting configurations where it is possible to lose multiple drives while still protecting valuable data, hot plug fans and power supplies , redundant ECC-protected RAM, redundant processors and processor power modules, fault-tolerant network configuration options, hot plug PCI slots supporting redundant or hot-replace controllers, and more. However, a number of differentiators still exist between the different server hardware vendors today: -
Price-Performance ” the ratio of the two is sometimes overlooked. True, nearly every vendor can provide a certain level of performance, but at what price per transaction or gigabyte? -
Service & Support ” some vendors maintain their own highly trained professional services organizations. Others rely on third parties to provide support. Additionally, not all vendors offer the ability to respond to issues in two or four hours. Finally, minimizing third parties usually benefits the customer from a total cost of ownership perspective. -
One-stop shopping ” not all vendors offer the breadth or depth of products and services that are required in a typical portal implementation (or any enterprise application implementation, for that matter). To minimize post-support finger-pointing, stick with a single vendor that can address at a minimum your enterprise server, disk subsystem, and systems management requirements. Additionally, a company's internal computing standards might dictate the preference of one server or disk subsystem platform over another simply for the sake of server standardization. For example, if a company has standardized on the Widget model XYZ server platform, the following is true: -
The company's IT organization has experience with this XYZ platform ”they know it, they know how the OS behaves on it, they know how to install and maintain it, back it up effectively, and so forth -
IT has spares (network cards, disk drives, and so on) on hand that are likely interchangeable or at minimum compatible with newer , similar Widget-based technology -
IT and IT Management have a relationship in place with their Widget account team, including a single point of contact capable of leveraging multiple product and services organizations inside Widget when the need arises Once the hardware vendor has been selected, the process of sizing the SharePoint Portal Server solution landscape begins. In the next section, we will address this, as well as different approaches towards architecting the SPS solution landscape and sizing particular components of the landscape. |
