MOSS gathers momentum: Readers rave about the new and improved Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 May, 2007: Redmond Magazine, Joanne Cummings "With SharePoint, we've shown the management people that yes, you can really keep a project on track with team members dispersed all over the country and all over the world.”

Microsoft Financing

The Microsoft Corporation now offers flexible financing options to their customers. Through this program, customers can finance the entire cost of their acquisition of technology solutions including hardware, software, and professional services. Contact us today at 866.844.5055 to discuss your finance options.

Social Computing

Microsoft announced Community Kit for SharePoint, a Web add-on that enables businesses to take advantage of "Enterprise 2.0" services, such as enhancing a blog's look, better wiki tools, and a tag cloud feature.

SharePoint Win!

The readers of asp.net PRO magazine have voted SharePoint Server 2007 as the best content management system for ASP.NET development.

asp.netPRO Award

asp.netPro recently awarded their Readers' Choice Awards. Voting was based on readers' perspective on products and services that make ASP.NET development easier, more efficient, and more profitable. Awarded Best Content Management System was Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consulting

SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consulting

Expanding your SharePoint installation to a server farm can be a daunting task. Making sure your portal is available and responsive to local and remote users should be a primary concern to any organization. Take advantage of our SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consultants clustering and failover expertise and avoid the many pitfalls for this type of project.

Server Farm Configuration

A server farm configuration has the following characteristics:

There are multiple separate servers running Windows SharePoint Services and SQL Server.
Multiple sites and subsites are grouped in site collections on each virtual server in IIS that is extended with Windows SharePoint Services. An ISAPI filter maps incoming URLs to specific sites on that virtual server.
Each virtual server has its own set of content databases in SQL Server. The configuration database for the server farm directs each server to the appropriate content database for a given Web site. The content for the top-level Web site and any subsites within a site collection is stored in the same content database.
Performance and capacity are increased by adding additional servers running Windows SharePoint Services and SQL Server.
Scaling is achieved by adding more front-end Web servers (to increase throughput for the existing content), and by adding top-level Web sites and subsites (to support more content).
Load balancing is achieved by using switching and routing hardware, or by using software such as Windows Network Load Balancing Service.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture for the Windows SharePoint Services in a server farm configuration.

What Is a Server Farm?
Scaling Solutions with Server Farms
Increasing Solution Availability with Server Farms
Increasing Flexibility and Manageability with Server Farms
How our SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Experts can Help

What Is a Server Farm?

Load balancing

Two or more networked servers providing a single role or service group to the farm
Distribute load across multiple servers

Scalability

Scale server role out by adding additional servers as needed

Fault tolerance

Farm solution continues to service requests in the event of an outage of single server if the role is load-balanced

Scaling Solutions with Server Farms

Physical bottlenecks

Four primary physical resources used in a Web farm: •Temporary Memory (RAM) •Processor (CPU) •Disk Access (Disk I/O Read/Write), •Network Performance (Network and NICs)

Scaling up

Increase farm performance by upgrading memory, processors, and/or disks in a single server

Scaling Out

Add additional servers to a topology tier/server role in order to distribute and share the workload

Increasing Availability with Server Farms

Requirement	Issues and options
Load balancing	Why load balance? Hardware or software load balancing?
Redundancy	Multiple servers for a single role Some server roles cannot be redundant
Farm Database Availability	Mirroring Clustering Failover

Increasing Flexibility and Manageability with Server Farms

Incremental expansion

Easier to add additional servers (do not need to remove server)
Diminishing return of improvement when scaling up

Managing Upgrades

Server can be removed from farm and upgraded

Delegated administration

Farm Administrators, Server Administrators, and DBAs

How our SharePoint Server Farm Architecture Consulting Experts can Help

We are able to provide a complete project team, or participate on an as-needed basis if you already have an internal project team and just need to augment the team with an "expert".