Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

Planning for Scalability

Before deploying your portal, you need to make preparations for its growth. You need to ask some serious questions, and catalog your current and proposed infrastructure. Let's assume that you do not have a portal in place, but that you have an existing IT infrastructure.

The first step in the process is to understand the baseline. You should assess the current infrastructure, cataloging your assets, capacity, and usage. Determine current availability statistics, maximum loads, and performance parameters. Do you have excess capacity or a shortfall? How much are you spending on the current infrastructure?

For each component of a solution, performance is a function of factors including:

• Amount of information retrieved from ...