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

Summary

A large international insurance company was experiencing ongoing performance issues on its SharePoint 2010 production environment — a sizable estate of 5 separate farms and approximately 120 servers, with page loads of around 10 seconds. INNERLUXES created a comprehensive assessment methodology, revealed the critical issues, and delivered a detailed performance-improvement report plus a vision for migrating to a newer SharePoint version.

About the Client

The Client is a Canadian company focused on the development of social business platforms and sites in SharePoint and other .NET technologies, with extensive consulting experience. The end client is a large international insurance company that employs a global workforce and requested an analysis of its intranet performance issues.

The 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. Among the issues to be analyzed and solved:

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

The Solution

INNERLUXES was responsible for the whole assessment process and created an assessment methodology covering all aspects affecting system performance:

• SharePoint farms assessment (including log-file collection and analysis, physical infrastructure analysis, and farm configuration assessment).
• Storage assessment.
• SQL Server clusters assessment.
• DR farm assessment.
• Networking and authentication assessment (including proxy-tier assessment, AD assessment, authentication and networking assessment, network traffic, load balancing, and SAML token lifecycle).
• Applications assessment (including authentication providers and agents assessment, custom application assessment and impact analysis, analysis of custom application exceptions, and content assessment and analysis).

During the assessment, INNERLUXES revealed all the critical issues and provided an assessment report with detailed recommendations for performance improvement. After analyzing the system architecture, the team also provided a vision for migration to a new SharePoint version.

The Results

• INNERLUXES thoroughly analyzed the end client's infrastructure and all aspects affecting system performance, and created the assessment methodology.
• Based on INNERLUXES's recommendations, the end client solved the issues and improved the system's performance and stability.
• All activities were performed in accordance with the end client's requirements and within the stated time frame.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2010, .NET, C#, Visual Studio, Wireshark, Fiddler.