Hardware Choices

Selecting an appropriate server platform is an extremely important component of a successful portal deployment. The key hardware requirements are the CPU speed, amount of RAM, and hard disk space:

• Increased CPU resources allow SharePoint Portal Server to provide an excellent user experience to large numbers of users during peak usage periods.
• If there are insufficient CPU resources, users experience unacceptable server response times during peak usage periods.
• Additional RAM and hard disk space allow SharePoint Portal Server to provide improved user performance.
• If there is insufficient RAM, users experience unacceptable server response times regardless of the number of active users.
• If there is insufficient hard disk space, users are not able to search for or save additional documents.

An important step in determining your server hardware requirements is establishing clear performance and scalability requirements. For more information about determining your hardware requirements, see Chapter 7, Planning Server Capacity.

For the purposes of this chapter, use the following guidelines:

Deploying an Enterprise Portal

Characteristics

• Primarily browse and search activity
• 10,000 users
• 10 authors; 10,000 readers
• 2,000,000 or more indexed documents

Hardware

• Quad processor 700-megahertz (MHz) Pentium III with 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM, 100-GB hard disk (3 spindles).
• A large search site benefits from using a server dedicated to crawling content to improve performance for users of the server dedicated to searching.

Deploying a Business Unit Portal

Characteristics

• Some document management but still a high volume of browse and search activity
• 500–2,000 users
• All author rights
• Multiple workspaces
• 10,000 documents stored; 100,000–200,000 included in the index

Hardware

• Quad processor 700-MHz Pentium III with 2 GB of RAM, 100-GB hard disk (3 spindles).

Deploying a Workgroup Portal

Characteristics

• Document management activities equivalent to browse and search activities
• Fewer than 200 users
• Equal number of authors and readers
• 100,000 indexed documents

Hardware

• Single processor 500-MHz Pentium III with 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM, 20-GB hard disk.