Globally Dispersed Audiences & Performance

Question

We have a large number of end-users who wish to consume content from SharePoint. They are globally dispersed and they consume content (documents/images/video) currently from 3 separate Farms. This topology has huge licensing implications and we want to consolidate our infrastructure.

For some end-users SharePoint seems fast because they are located near to the content they consume. For others it is horribly slow but they have no perception of the wires and cables, bandwidth and latency that affects their usability and consumption of content.

We want to centralise our infrastructure while still making SharePoint super-fast for all our end-users no matter their location.

How do we solve the problem of making SharePoint fast enough to deliver content without having to put SharePoint servers geographically located near our users who consume the content?

Answer 1

Distance is a key factor here, so I think you will still have servers located remotely. There are many companies who specialize in this (a quick Google search for SharePoint geo replication or geo redundancy brings up a number of them). With that said, however, here are a few things that may help:

First, you can publish service applications between farms. This would allow you to have resource intensive service applications (such as search and the user profile application) on your main farm and publish those to your secondary farms that don't have as many servers, etc.

Secondly, you can use content deployment for content that is published by a few and viewed by many. Basically, you publish content in one site collection and then it gets deployed out to another site collection (can be on a completely different farm) on a schedule that you configure. If your secondary farms are more "read-only" and just have the web application services running, this would help reduce the cost of those farms.

Third, you could consider doing some sort of sync between independent farms. Metalogix (http://www.metalogix.com/Products/Replicator/Replicator-for-SharePoint.aspx) and other companies make products to do this for you.