Wow, thanks for all of the detail Rick! I appreciate all of your thoughts
about RAM, etc but I have a pretty good feel for all of that. I am strictly
trying to get a feel for the disk space required for the databases involved.
I will try to provide the extra pertinent information you asked about for
this.
- There will be approximately 600-700 resources in the Enterprise Resource
Pool
- I don't think there will be 200 projects per year because many of them
are long running (multi-year). I would say that there will be 150-200
initially and maybe 100-125 new ones each year after that.
- WSS usage is still a little bit of an unknown. I think we will start
with relatively small usage like 20-30 MB per project but would not be
surprised to see this grow (ie, store more types of documents) as everyone
gets more comfortable with using Project Server.
As for other information about the infrastructure, here we go:
- 2 servers in a load balanced farm supporting MSPS, WSS.
- 2 servers in a load balanced farm supporting View Proc and Session Mgmt
(the
2 servers as opposed to 1 is more for redundancy than load requirements).
- 2 servers clustered for SQL (all databases). This is an existing high
performance cluster that supports some other databases as well. I expect to
run both SQL and OLAP here.
- I do have a SAN and expect to use it for SQL and WSS storage needs. The
web and app servers will only use local drives for everything else. There is
already a large area of the SAN carved out for databases and I just need to
specify how much space to set aside for this implementation. I had to take a
total wild guess about 2 months ago and said 200GB, so it sounds like I am at
least in the right ballpark. Also, it should not be that big of a deal to
add more space later if needed.
- I plan to follow typical best practices for logical disk separation. Two
drives on the web and app server with OS and software on one and anything
else on the other. For SQL (on the SAN) I will use an existing quorum drive,
and will have data and transaction logs on different drives. One area I am
not sure about is whether WSS stores documents as files on a drive with
metadata in the database or if the files are stored as binaries in the
database? I don't have lots of experience with WSS...
- The majority of the user base (400+) will access via LAN. The rest
(located in UK and Germany) will access via WAN. There will occasionally be
VPN access to the network (people working from home), but not much.
- The OLAP cube is going to be extended. The current plan is to use a
third party product called Portfolio Analyzer Extender
(
http://www.bogdanov-associates.com/eng.asp?rubr_id=484) for doing this. I
anticipate adding a handful of Project and Resource level custom fields,
adding weeks to the time dimension and adding Task data (including some
custom fields) to the cube. I also expect to generate the cube with the full
date range of data, at least for now.
Anyway, given all of that info, what I am trying to drive to an answer on is
this:
- Project Server DB - initial size and annual growth expectation
- WSS Config DB - initial size and annual growth expectation (expect to be
negligible)
- WSS Content DB - initial size and annual growth expectation (depends
largely on whether documents are stored in DB per my question above)
- OLAP cube - initial size and annual growth expectation
I don't need to be super accurate, but I am trying to come up with numbers
that I can back up with some level of analysis rather than just taking a wild
guess.
Thanks again for your help and for any additional help you may be able to
provide with all of the extra info. Much appreciated.
Thanks,
Mark
