Sharepoint Application and seperate site collection

Question

We have one site collection with several departmental sites within. The DB is approx 60G at the moment. Using SP2010 sp1.

I'm now adding an application which consists of several tasks and several departments will be using this application.

Would it be better to create a new site collection with separate db for this application or include it as a new site within the existing site collection. My main concern is over database size.

Thanks

Answer 1

Capacity Planning is what you need here. Its a whole lot easier if you plan for capacity from the start as information tends to get bigger with passing time on any Intranet.

With the context of SharePoint, there can be multitude of factors that should be considered before restructuring your intranet solution design along side sizing for content databases.

In addition to Vardhaman's answer ,here are some quickies to get you started with the evaluation of sizing :-

1. Average Size of Uploaded documents per department basis can be a important usage factor that you can consider when splitting your existing department sites.
2. Number of Uploaded documents per department site should give you a quick insight on the frequency of usage department wise.
3. Need for BLOB cache and Remote Blob Server can be determined with the above usage statistics and you can come up with some near future projections based on historical data.
   • Size based reorganization - Split high volume site collections into separate content databases.
   • Usage based reorganization - Split high traffic site collections into separate web applications. There are several benefits in the longer run with this approach.

Answer 2

The recommended size for 1 site collection is maximum 100 GB. If you think your application is going to be larger than that, I will suggest you go for another site collection.

A site collection can be as large as the content database size limit for the applicable usage scenario.

In general, we strongly recommend limiting the size of site collections to 100 GB for the following reasons: Certain site collection actions, such as site collection backup/restore or the Windows PowerShell cmdlet Move-SPSite, cause large Microsoft SQL Server operations which can affect performance or fail if other site collections are active in the same database. For more information, see Move-SPSite.

SharePoint site collection backup and restore is only supported for a maximum site collection size of 100 GB. For larger site collections, the entire content database must be backed up. If multiple site collections larger than 100 GB are contained in a single content database, backup and restore operations can take a long time and are at risk of failure.

SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits