Microsoft SharePoint provides a collaborative workspace to share ideas, publish content, build productivity apps, track projects and keep your team connected in the workplace. With 20,000 unique users joining the ranks on average, every day, high availability for SharePoint deployments has become a key part of business continuity plans. It is recommended that high availability and disaster recovery be of the highest priority when engineering SharePoint environments since other important aspects such as performance and capacity are negated if farm servers are unavailable or cannot be recovered after an unexpected failure.
SharePoint high availability is achieved in the web tier by deploying multiple front end servers to serve web pages and host web parts. A load balancer directs traffic across these servers, monitors health and ensures that the best possible target is used for individual requests. Kemp's LoadMaster incorporates data compression on responses to application requests to reduce bandwidth utilization. When combined with content caching to reduce the number of requests that have to be directed to pool servers for static content, improved application performance results.
To further enhance SharePoint deployments, Kemp’s Windows Server-optimized adaptive scheduling algorithm leverages a lightweight web server agent that reports on server instance resource utilization to help the load balancer make better decisions. This allows the LoadMaster to avoid sending client requests to front ends that have lower resources available because they are performing resource-intensive tasks such as search. All of these optimizations allows LoadMaster to help application owners deliver the best SharePoint experience possible.
To learn more about how LoadMaster can help to keep your SharePoint deployment highly performing and available Contact Kemp.