If your business plans to use Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, it would be wise on your part to have an insight into effective capacity management. This way, you will have adequate knowledge for sizing, planning, and controlling service capacity to make sure that the minimum performance levels as specified in your SLA are exceeded.
Providing IT services to your clients at a reasonable cost and still meet performance levels defined in your SLAs is what good capacity management is all about. Remember that capacity management is an ongoing process, since you will need to change the implementation procedures based on how your content and usage get affected by time. In other words, you will need to plan for change and growth, so that your SharePoint Server 2010 based environment can go on delivering an effective business solution. So, here are some steps that will help you to carry out successful capacity management for your SharePoint Server 2010 environment.
Analyzing the model
You will need to analyze your existing solutions and estimate the expected demand and targets before modeling your SharePoint Server 2010-based environment. You can do this by gathering information about your data requirements, user base, throughput targets, end-user latency etc, which will help you to have a clear idea of the SharePoint Server features that you would like to deploy. You should also have a clear idea of your dataset and expected workload for proper sizing of SharePoint Server 2010. In other words, to implement this solution, you should be able to explain dataset characteristics like content distribution and content size, as well as describe the characteristics of the workload that includes operations used most frequently and the number of users. You may also analyze your IIS Logs to know more about key metrics about an existing SharePoint Server 2010 deployment. This way, you will be able to handle the workload distribution well as you would have the knowledge about how many users are active, how heavily the system is being used by them, kind of requests that are coming in, and the kind of clients from where they originate etc.
Choosing the right architecture
To offer services at reasonable cost and meet performance standards, it’s important to decide on the architecture when you install SharePoint Server 2010. So, based on what your business needs are, you may use a single server or link multiple servers to a SharePoint Server farm, which has clustered or mirrored database servers and offers discreet application servers to handle various services. You should also ensure that clients can access data in quick time through the network. Having proper disk management in place is another important factor. It’s not just enough to have adequate space for your data. Rather, you should also evaluate the on-going demand and growth, and make sure that your storage architecture is not creating bottlenecks in the system or slowing it down.
Testing and Optimization
This is a critical stage of effective capacity management. Before deploying the new architectures, test them to see if they can help you achieve the desired performance and capacity targets. This way, you can also identify bottlenecks, if any, and deal with them before they affect users in a live deployment. When you are upgrading your SharePoint Server 2007 and plan to bring architectural changes, such tests can help you make sure that the new SharePoint Server-based environment works well and can be optimized to its full potential.
Maintenance and Monitoring after deployment
You need to monitor your server to find out bottlenecks fast and maintain system performance. For this, you should understand the key indicators that will help you identify which particular regions of your farm require attention. You should also learn the right way of interpreting these indicators. In case you find that your farm is operating beyond the defined targets, you can adjust your farm by modifying your topology, removing or adding hardware resources, or changing the way data is stored.
So, be ready to monitor your SharePoint Server 2010 environment and modify in its early stages, as and when the need for adjustment arises. Once the environment comes to a stable point, you may use the defaults settings as you will no longer need detailed monitoring.
Converge Point (www.convergepoint.com) is a leading SharePoint Consulting firm focused solely on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies. Our expert SharePoint consultants help organizations with SharePoint Implementation, SharePoint Integration, SharePoint Intranet, SharePoint Extranet, SharePoint workflows, Custom SharePoint Web Parts and SharePoint Branding.
