Audit and Improvement Roadmap for SharePoint Environment with 5 Farms and 120 Servers

Customer

The Customer is a Canadian company focused on development of world-class social business platforms and sites in SharePoint and other .NET technologies. The Company has over 10 years of rich consulting experience working with dozens of Fortune 500 and world-leading brands – and more than 200 engagements to-date.

The Customer got a request from an international insurance company that employs over 70,000 professionals across the globe for the analysis of their Intranet performance issues. The Client offers insurance, retirement and savings products all over the world.

Challenge

The primary objective was to handle ongoing performance issues on the SharePoint 2010 production environment, which contains 5 separate farms and approximately 120 servers.

The following issues can be marked among those to be analyzed and solved:

• Multiple authentication layers causing system lags
• Multiple re-directs managed and generated by a third-party authentication provider
• Issues with SAML tokens caching and optimization
• Slow log-ins/clocking/page rendering on the portal farm (approx. 10 seconds for page load)
• Issues with proxy tier and CPU/resources utilization
• Investigation of issues related to storage and its optimization; to SharePoint custom applications and custom solutions
• Platform

Solution

ScienceSoft team was responsible for the whole assessment process. We have created an assessment methodology with respect to all the aspects affected system performance:

• SharePoint farms assessment (incl. log files collection and analysis, physical infrastructure analysis, farms configuration assessment)
• Storage assessment
• SQL server clusters assessment
• DR farm assessment
• Networking and authentication assessment (incl. proxy tier assessment, AD assessment, authentication and networking assessment, network traffic, LB, SAML tokens lifecycle)
• Applications assessment (incl. authentication providers and agents assessment, custom application assessment and impact analysis, analysis of custom application exceptions, content assessment and analysis)

During the assessment ScienceSoft team has revealed all the critical issues and provided the assessment report with detailed recommendations for performance improving.

In addition, after analyzing the system architecture, our team provided the vision of migration to a new SharePoint version.

Results

ScienceSoft team thoroughly analyzed the Customer’s infrastructure, all the aspects affected system performance, and created the assessment methodology. Based on the ScienceSoft’s recommendations the Customer solved the issues and improved the system performance and stability.

All activities were performed in accordance with the Customer’s requirements and within the stated time frame.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2010, .NET, C#, Visual Studio, Ware Shark, Fiddler.