Dell and F5 are providing the technical expertise to enable successful Microsoft® Office SharePoint® solutions. Using Dell™ servers and storage in tandem with F5® appliances, businesses can deliver SharePoint applications that are fast, available, and secure.

Overview of F5's Sharepoint Acceleration Capability

One of the most important things to consider when deploying a centralized application like Microsoft SharePoint is the end-user experience: Will the application provide the necessary functionality in a timely manner? If an application is performing poorly because of configuration or infrastructure problems, end users will often abandon the application and resort to manual workarounds. Conversely, improving the performance of the application often leads to an increase in application adoption and user productivity.

F5 improves application response times and utilization for SharePoint and other applications on the network. F5 devices efficiently control the traffic flows for SharePoint deployments by optimizing client-side delivery while maintaining server-optimized connections on the inside of the network. For example, when remote users connect to SharePoint Portal servers at varying connection rates F5 independently handles each connection, optimizing end-user experience and server performance. F5 devices can also offload SSL and compression processing from the servers, freeing server resources and increasing server capacity for SharePoint 2007 deployments by more than 25 percent. For users in remote offices, F5 has been shown to improve SharePoint application performance over high-latency links on the order of five times, while reducing bandwidth by 30 times (Source: F5 ARN Guide for Sharepoint )

Ease of Deployment: Simply choose the custom-built policy for Microsoft SharePoint from a list for out-of-the-box acceleration.

Security: Because SharePoint deployments often contain critical, sensitive internal information, making sure that the application is secure is not only important, it can be vital to the success of the business. When F5's SSLVPN and Application Security Manager are used together with Sharepoint, companies are provided with advanced end-point security including pre-login checks and application layer security (preventing attacks such as cross-site scripting, invalid characters, SQL injection, buffer overflow, etc).

F5 Products that can optimize Sharepoint deployments:

• BigIP Local Traffic Manager
• SSLVPN
• Application Security Manager
• Global Traffic Manager
• WebAccelerator
  
  

F5/Sharepoint Quick Links

F5 ARN Guide for Sharepoint	F5 Deployment Guide for Sharepoint
	White Paper: Performance Solution for Document Distribution

Dell and Sharepoint

• Dell and Sharepoint - How Dell can help architect Microsoft Sharepoint
• Microsoft Sharepoint 2007- Homepage for Sharepoint Server 2007
• Dell Deploys Sharepoint 2007 -- Case Study for deploying Sharepoint on Dell PowerEdge Servers and Storage

Other Links

• dellteam @f5.com – F5 team supporting Dell
• www.f5.com – Home page for F5