SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

16

Designing Your Infrastructure Architecture

By Neil Hodgkinson

A significant part of the process you follow as the architect of a SharePoint Server 2010 platform involves studying the options that are available to meet the needs of the business into which the farm is going to be deployed. This process has several stages, and this chapter helps you draw some of these together into one place where you can make those selections and decide on the best possible option for your circumstance.

In this chapter, you learn about the key pieces of the project documentation needed to gather those key parameters and requirements that will help you design the infrastructure. Earlier chapters of this book covered these topics in much more detail. However, this chapter also looks at the key issues. Following are the topics for review:

• Project requirements
• Information architecture
• Solution architecture
• SharePoint software boundaries
• Non-functional requirements of the project

After reviewing what you need and what the business needs, you learn about how and where you can house or locate the platform, including choices for data center services and how they can impact what you design. You also learn about the importance of understanding the impact a deployment of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 will have on the network infrastructure, and how it may affect the choices you make for ensuring that the end user has as good an experience as possible.

This chapter concentrates on designing the infrastructure ...