Top SharePoint Storage Resources

@travelingdarren "@joeloleson Can you point me to any documentation on suggested server HD capacity for a new SharePoint deployment for my SysAdmin?"

Some people are just looking for the quick and easy answer for those….

• Quick answers from my blog: Disk Allocation and Disk I/O
• Mike Watson’s post on SharePoint and Storage (great links and cliff notes on storage)
• Quick Top 10 SQL Storage Optimization Techniques (best practice) – Deep and Awesome
• Quick Samples for Planning: MS IT Sites and Storage, SharePoint file sizing, user per site samples, File Server Sample Data File Sizes
• If you read only one paper, make it this one, I call the SharePoint Storage whitepaper titled "Performance recommendations for storage planning and monitoring (.doc)
• A Plethora of Key Capacity Planning Resources when it’s not just about disk storage…
• Other posts by me: How many servers per my X TBs? and  What Not to Store in SharePoint
• Also start with the table in this Technet article as MAX boundaries to work with "Plan for software boundaries"
• For more Microsoft resources go to the Best Practices Resource Center and Performance and Capacity Resource Center

Some people want the whitepaper, the decks and the documentation:

• SharePoint Server 2007 Scalability and Performance whitepaper – the millions of items whitepaper by Knowedge Lake, MCS and Fujitsu
• Integration of SQL Server 2008 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Check out the info on db compression, transparent encryption, and resource governor
• Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for Office SharePoint Server: Performance Recommendations and Best Practices (white paper) – Referenced above.  This paper went through a lot of hands to get this much best practices in one doc.
• Database maintenance for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (white paper) – Bill Baer’s (MS IT) Great resource
• 10 Things To Optimize your SharePoint Server Indexing – Easy and Quick Blog Post – Must Read.

The three layers you need to worry about – 1. List Scale 2. Site (& collection) Scale 3. Database Scale

• Working with Large Lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007" – Great resource from Steve Peschka… Hands down helps you setup your scalable lists better than any other resource more at Revisiting List Scalability
• Tips on Site Collection Sizing
• How large for a single SharePoint content database? compare with SharePoint Tech Content Database sizing and capacity planning (backup/restore implications)
• SharePoint Governance through Database Design Considerations

Bottlenecks most people forget: Network (between WFEs and SQL), Backup Disk IO Network usage, SQL Disk blocking, front end and backend Memory (worker process and SQL processes), antivirus disk contention

Don’t trust anything in this capacity planning tool as far as storage goes, but it’s not a bad one for sanity checking your planning SharePoint Capacity Models.  The help files go into the assumptions, and may be helpful.  If you’re doing your ownt testing you should look at the Performance Counters and VSTT: SPDataPop WSSDW.exe

Plan enterprise content storage – few guiding principals, but in my opinion, too high level to be useful

What about planning for your IIS logs and other log locations?  "How do I troubleshoot SharePoint, So many Logs" (Look at the locations so you can monitor them.)  What else is on my C drive (here’s some legacy WSS 2.0 file location answers that are pretty decent.

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Is the File Server Dead? – Before you start doing massive migrations this is a must read.

A generic resource on RAID configuration Planning the Layout and RAID Level of Volumes.  Also get a reality check with this real world data from Microsoft’s Intranet Portal MSW – Deploying and Supporting Enterprise Search.

There was a session at Teched on Storage that went over really well "OFC357 How to Plan for SharePoint Storage Management for Multi-Terabyte Deployment" you’ll have to bug Mike Watson or Todd Klindt for their deck.  My deck on SharePoint Admin Fundamentals from Istanbul does have disk capacity recommendations:

Need cloud scale?  See Massive Scale Deployment – Modularity in SharePoint Farms

If you get done with this post and decide you need to fix various things… Check out a recent post of mine on Automating and Scripting SharePoint Administration and refer to Gary LaPoint’s STSADM extensions for additional help.