Datasheet

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CHAPTER 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 under the hood
To show you what I mean and illustrate that the suggested hardware requirements are
probably adequate for your needs, assume your office has 1,000 people who are going to use
SharePoint, and 60 percent of them will be actively using SharePoint daily. You estimate that
each user probably performs about 50 operations a day. (Most of them will spend more time
editing a document than retrieving it from the document library or uploading it.) Let’s say your
office has, at maximum, 9 hours of work time a day and a peak factor of 4. Peak factor is a scale
between 1 and 5 that refers to how often or how likely there are to be peaks in normal daily
usage. One indicates that there is practically no particular time of peak usage during a business
day, and 5 indicates that practically the entire day is a peak use time. I never go less than 4, just
in case.
Membership in Club SharePoint Is Not Always All-Inclusive
Many businesses don’t always allow every employee access to SharePoint. Therefore, when you deter-
mine who will use the SharePoint sites, don’t just include everyone in the company by default. To help
ensure that your calculations are as accurate as possible, consider exactly who will do what.
Let’s summarize the data we have:
Users: 1,000
Percent active usage: 60
Operations: 50 (per person, per day)
Work hours: 9
Peak factor: 4
And the formula that uses that information is as follows:
Users
× Usage × Operations × Peak × (360,000 × Work hours)
Or in our case:
1,000
× 60 × 50 × 4 × (360,000 × 9)
That will bring you to the operations per second that your server needs to deliver for your
users. In this case, that number is 3.7 operations per second (OPS).
Given the standard formula shown previously, using a quad-core, 2.5 GHz per core proces-
sor and 8 GB of RAM should be enough to handle at least 10 user operations per second. All you
need is 3.7 operations per second for 1,000 people doing 50 operations a day. You can see why I
think the starting hardware requirements are sufficient for most small to medium businesses.
Remember, just like the processor, RAM is important, if only so the server can render pages
efficiently. Keep in mind that each web application a server hosts does increase the amount of
RAM the server uses. Having more web applications means more RAM. Indexing is also RAM-
intensive. Keep in mind that SharePoint often rapidly increases in use and increases in the per-
centage of people using it. As SharePoint catches on, you might find yourself at peak usage more
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