Determining storage needs–and the hardware solution–is a critical step in planning a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to establish clear, detailed performance and scalability requirements for portal site deployments, since it can be hard to predict the level or type of site use. To complicate matters, the level of use frequently grows and changes over time. Nevertheless, you can often use throughput measured as pages per second as a guideline for measuring performance. To learn more about determining the needed throughput, see "Scalability Recommendations," later in this paper.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses the services provided by Windows SharePoint Services. Because Windows SharePoint Services addresses the needs of individual teams with a general set of features, few strategic choices are required in deploying the functionality needed for Windows SharePoint Services. However, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 affects the way information is presented across groups and divisions, and how it is distilled for executives in the enterprise. As a result, architectural decisions are largely dependent on business objectives such as:

• Personal site strategy
• Portal site hierarchy
• Differentiating the need for a team site versus a portal site

For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide and the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Intranets

Hardware Requirements

There is no simple formula to determine the hardware requirements for a given solution because the demands that a Web site makes on its servers are the result of a complex interaction involving several factors. Consider these questions:

• How many users will this solution serve at peak? (What are the typical usage profiles?)
• How much throughput is needed from the system (pages per second)?
• How much content (areas, personal sites, SharePoint sites, document libraries, documents, and lists) will the solution contain?
• Is high availability needed?
• What is the performance impact of customizations?

Unless you have more specific data upon which to base the capacity planning, expect that every 1,000 users will require one page per second peak throughput.