Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Estimating Current and Future Storage Needs
Chapter 9: Capacity Planning 215
Estimate the size of the required content by analyzing the quantity and size of existing
documents in shared folders and other existing systems. To determine your current
and future storage needs, try to identify current access frequencies and patterns.
Once you have determined the total size of all documents you plan to store in
your SharePoint Portal Server farm, including all team sites, you can start to plan
disk space requirements. You must consider the number of versions for all documents
you plan to store. Multiply the number of versions you expect by the total size
of all documents to get the total storage size for documents.
The SQL Server component will be the place the documents are actually
stored. It needs disk space equal to twice the total size of all documents, including
versions, you want to store in all your portal sites. This free disk space is required on
the drive where the SQL Server databases reside. Also, the storage requirement does
not include any operating system or supporting system software. If you plan on storing
large quantities of files, you should store the SQL Server databases that Share-
Point Portal Server uses on a storage area network (SAN). You should refer to SQL
Server documentation for information on what SAN products are compatible with
SQL Server.
Note SQL Server does not support storing database files on Network-
Attached Storage (NAS), so the free storage requirement must be met on a
local physical disk on the SQL Server or on a SAN.
Once you have determined total document storage for SQL Server, you must
determine the total size of documents being indexed. Take the total size of each
content source—file shares, exchange public folders, and websites—that you want
to index, and add that sum to the total size of all files stored in the server farm. This
number is the total size of all documents to be crawled. Take this number and divide
it by two. That is the total storage required on each indexing server in your farm.
Then divide the number by two again. That is the total space required on each
search server in your farm.
In a single-server environment, all components run on the same system. This
means you need all the storage space on a single system. A single-server environment
needs free space equal to 2.75 times the total size of all documents stored if
there are no external content sources. A small server farm separates the SQL Server
storage component from the other components. In a small server farm, the SQL
Server component needs twice the total size of documents to store in free space and
the server that runs the SharePoint Portal Server components needs to have .75 times