Statistics and information about large SharePoint farms

Question

I'm looking for information and statistics about large SharePoint farms. Who runs such a farm? How many users do they have? How many documents do they manage/store? What does the farm architecture look like?

To put it bluntly what is SharePoint able to manage?

Answer 1

Obviously Microsoft themselves have the largest SharePoint deployment in the world:

TechNet Webcast: How Microsoft IT Manages the World's Largest Windows SharePoint Services Deployment (Level 300)

The U.S. Air Force also has a global intranet of some 4000 sites: AFCENT SharePoint Project

A couple of case studies have a lot more technical detail than usual: Siemens Automation and Drives and Wachovia Bank

Finally, a search for SharePoint at Microsoft's Case Studies site yields 195 results. Have fun :)

Answer 2

This is covered in Technet - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/sharepointserver/bb736741.aspx

There are whitepapers, example deployments and best practice guidance discussing scalability and performance.

SharePoint can deal with many many TBs of data, millions of users, and can scale as well as anything else depending on how you install and configure it. A badly configured / architected SharePoint implementation will not scale.

Answer 3

I was the architect of the "The U.S. Air Force also has a global intranet" mentioned above, let me know if you have specific questions about the implementation.