Authors: Ravikanth Chaganti and Quocdat Nguyen  -   January 2012

SharePoint 2010 large farm performance study with Compellent Storage is the Reference Architecture (RA) demonstrating a comprehensive study and describes how a Large SharePoint farm for collaboration usage, built using Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers and Dell Compellent™ Storage Center storage arrays with Fiber Channel Controllers Series 40, performed under load testing.    This paper’s intent is to deliver the following benefits to the business:  Credibility thru detailed performance data & results, Guidance with recommended configurations and deployment guidance and best practices, and Distinction by highlighting Dell’s Server, Storage and Networking Products.     

The key findings from this study are:

  • The recommended farm architecture was able to support more than 100,000 users with 10 percent concurrency for collaboration usage of the SharePoint farm.
  • The farm architecture used in this study had an average farm response time of 87ms or 0.087 seconds at the maximum supported load, which was well below the one-second response time target.
  • The Dell Compellent storage backend was capable of supporting a 2TB SharePoint content database with an average disk response time of 2ms and ~2400 average disk transfers per second.
  • Using hardware load balancing solution enabled us to scale the farm beyond 4 Web Front-Ends (WFE) and achieve the maximum desired concurrent user load.

The paper also details information on how the farm was configured, factors considered while designing the farm, how Dell performs SharePoint load testing, and several performance metrics of various farm components.

Link to the white paper 

Link to the Blog post

Link to previous Performance Studies on a SharePoint Farm

Previous Releases:

For previous releases of Reference Architecture and Performance Study white papers, please refer to the Featured Whitepapers wiki page.