1. SharePoint 2013 WAN case studies: United Airlines, Teck Resources, and
Fabrikam
Summary: Learn how three global companies designed their SharePoint architectures to meet their
requirements.
Applies to:
In this article:
 United Airlines—Central deployment, single datacenter
 Fabrikam—Central deployment, multiple datacenter
 Teck Resources—Geographically dispersed deployment
Attributions
United Airlines, Fabrikam, and Teck Resources worked with Microsoft in the prerelease program for
SharePoint Server 2013. The IT teams for these companies were led by the following individuals.
Denise Wilson — Senior Manager of Enterprise Collaboration Services, United Airlines
Mahmood Jaffer — IT Specialist and SharePoint Architect for Teck Resources, Softlanding
(www.softlanding.ca)
Fabrikam is a fictionally named company representing a large world-wide manufacturing company. While the
Fabrikam IT team remains anonymous for this case study, the team was very active in providing valuable
feedback to Microsoft.
Microsoft Senior Consultant, Faizan Khan, worked with these companies to evaluate WAN performance and
recommend appropriate architectures using SharePoint 2013.
“Getting a chance to work on the latest version of SharePoint with three global customers with unique
scenarios was rewarding. I enjoyed tackling the previous SharePoint 2007 and 2010 paradigms related to
architecture and WAN connected users head on with all of the new SharePoint 2013 capabilities. It was great
to see how SharePoint 2013’s higher scalability and optimizations for connectivity over the WAN allowed
each customer to reduce their server footprint while providing an excellent social collaboration experience
for their own customers. When you start planning your SharePoint 2013 architecture I highly recommend

2. taking a look at the new opportunities to consolidate your infrastructure as these customers have done.” –
Faizan Khan
United Airlines—Central deployment, single datacenter
United Airlines is one of the world’s leading airlines serving 379 global airports on six continents with over
85,000 employees. United Airlines participated in the SharePoint Server 2013 Rapid Deployment Program
and the Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Technology Adoption Programs.
Denise Wilson, Senior Manager of Enterprise Collaboration Services team at United Airlines, worked with
Microsoft on several projects with SharePoint Server 2013. Wilson worked with Microsoft Consulting Services
to architect the new SharePoint Server 2013 environment and to provide feedback about the airline’s
experience using SharePoint Server 2013 in its WAN environment. Wilson also worked closely with the
SharePoint product team to develop and pilot a new procurement tool that is based on taxonomy and new
search features in SharePoint Server 2013.
United Airlines’ employees rely on SharePoint sites to complete job-related tasks at every company site,
including the 379 global airports. The route map for the airline shows the geographic environment. The
whole environment is served by a centralized SharePoint farm.
The environment includes high latency connections and other challenges that relate to performance. Wilson’s
team addressed these challenges in many ways. The following table summarizes some performance
optimizations that made a positive difference for the company. The third column of the table includes
additional options that other organizations with similar challenges can consider.
Challenges United optimizations
Additional options that
other organizations can
consider
High utilization, low-
bandwidth connections at
international locations
Quality of service (QoS), browser compression
(Internet Explorer)
WAN accelerators
Performance at airport
kiosks
Prioritizing customer kiosk
QoS, browser compression, local caching
SQL Server Master Data
Services (MDS), network
interface card optimization

3. performance over back office
performance of SharePoint
traffic
Intranet SharePoint
performance
Browser compression, Internet Information
Services (IIS) File Compression (static and
dynamic), binary large object (BLOB) Caching,
Output Caching, Object Caching
Branch Cache
SQL Server performance
optimization
Memory tuning, reducing databases,
reorganizing indexes, and rebalancing the
virtual log files
Do not enable auto-create
statistics
Set max degree of
parallelism (MAXDOP) to 1
The last row of the table, SQL Server performance optimization, highlights the importance of paying
attention to the overall health and performance of a SharePoint farm. While these are not WAN-specific
optimizations, the United Airlines team reported noticeably faster SharePoint performance across the
environment after optimizing compression and caching.
United Airlines operates its SharePoint environment in a Chicago-based datacenter. The disaster recovery
environment is hosted in its Houston datacenter. Currently the company uses log-shipping between farms.
Failover between farms is scripted and can be achieved in about 15 minutes. The following diagram shows
the disaster recovery environment.

4. “There are a number of options for supporting high availability and failover,” states Khan. “This example, log
shipping between farms across the WAN, is fairly standard. United Airlines has tiered their services and
databases. Some databases have a high or medium SLA and are log-shipped. Others, such as content
databases, have a lower SLA and are backed up and then restored. While log-shipping is a common way to
build a failover solution, database mirroring can also be used, as well as high availability groups with SQL
Server 2012.”
The overall performance in SharePoint Server 2013 is optimized for building and operating larger farms.
Even with the high number of users, large volume of content, and extensive use of the feature set, the
Microsoft Consulting team and the SharePoint product team feel comfortable recommending a single, large
farm for United Airlines.
The farm featured in the Enterprise-scale model resembles the farm designed by Khan for United Airlines.
This model provides guidance for patching and updating farms of this size.

5. Zoom into the model in full detail with Zoom.it from Microsoft
Visio version
PDF version
Fabrikam—Central deployment, multiple datacenter
Fabrikam is a fictional company that represents a large world-wide manufacturing company that participated
in the SharePoint Server 2013 prerelease program. Fabrikam has several-hundred-thousand employees and
many content farms that were migrated from the previous version.
A priority for Fabrikam is to take advantage of the new social features in SharePoint Server 2013, such as
offering My Sites to all employees. With the large number of employees, much consideration went into the
architecture for My Sites. Fabrikam weighed the benefits and risks of deploying one My Site farm versus
multiple My Site farms. The following table summarizes the advantages and disadvantage s for both
architectures.
Architecture 1 — One large My
Site farm and multiple content
farms
Architecture 2 — Two or three My Site farms
and multiple content farms
Description
All employees are served by one My
Site farm. The My Site farm and the
content farms are located in the same
datacenter and consume the User
Profile service from a dedicated
services farm which is also located in
the same datacenter.
Two or more My Site farms are deployed and
employees are spread across the My Site farms.
Each My Site farm consumes a dedicated User
Profile service application. The My Site farms and
the User Profile service applications can be spread
across datacenters if the User Profile service
application that is associated with a My Site farm is
located in the same datacenter. Content farms can
be spread across datacenters. However, each
content farm must consume a User Profile service
application that is located in the same datacenter.
The User Profile Replication Engine is used to
synchronize profile data across the User Profile
service applications.
Advantages
Single User Profile service to manage.
Single My Site farm to manage.
Less complexity—no need to use the
User Profile Replication Engine.
With a single User Profile service
My Site farms are smaller.
The environment can be distributed across multiple
datacenters.
Users can be assigned to My Site farms based on
location, which provides greater opportunities for

6. application, all social features are
expected to work as expected across
farms.
maintenance windows.
Disadvantages
Concern about outgrowing a single
My Site farm.
With a world-wide user base, it's
more challenging to schedule
maintenance windows.
More farms to maintain.
Setting up and managing the User Profile
Replication Engine is complex.
With multiple User Profile service applications,
some social features might not work as expected
across farms. For more information, see
"Deployment issues with multiple User Profile
service applications" in Plan for My Sites in
SharePoint Server 2013.
An advantage of the performance improvements in SharePoint Server 2013 is the ability to combine content
and users into a smaller number of large farms. These improvements helped Fabrikam to feel comfortable
with a single My Site farm (Architecture 1 in the previous table). This architecture avoids the complexity of
managing multiple User Profile service applications. However, with a single User Profile service application,
all of Fabrikam’s content farms must be located in the same datacenter. The following diagram shows
Fabrikam’s environment.
In the diagram, a separate datacenter hosts Fabrikam’s search farm and a dedicated search team manages
the farm.
Khan explains the design challenge: “Because the social capabilities of SharePoint Server 2013 are
extremely important to Fabrikam, we engaged in a number of detailed conversations on the best approach
to implementing a My Sites farm. Should we implement one large farm or fewer smaller farms? There are
pros and cons with either choice including manageability, availability, and functionality. There are also

7. concerns with scalability both on the application and storage layers. With new guidance from the Shar ePoint
product group, we decided the best approach is to implement a single farm. This approach results in the
best social experience while remaining within the scalability guidelines of SharePoint Server 2013. Due to
the large user base, Fabrikam highlights the ability of SharePoint Server 2013 to scale while minimizing the
number of farms required.”
For more information about how to design architectures that have multiple farms and multiple datacenters,
see the following model: Multi-farm architectures with SharePoint Server 2013.
Zoom into the model in full detail with Zoom.it from Microsoft
Visio version
PDF version
A goal of working with Fabrikam in the prerelease program was to understand how SharePoint Server 2013
performs over a variety of WAN connections. Fabrikam used Visual Studio to script a load test that is made
up of many unit tests and then ran the load test from multiple geographic locations. For more information
about how to create a similar test, see SharePoint 2013 WAN testing with Visual Studio 2012 walkthrough.
In this first set of results, two users in the Fabrikam Shanghai, China, office ran the load test against the
SharePoint sites in the Texas, USA, datacenter. Latency is about 190 milliseconds roundtrip. The upload,
download, and Outlook Web Access (OWA) tests were conducted with a 1 mb file.

8. The test results show that performance is good, especially for the social tasks.
The next set of results shows performance for the same load test across a larger set of geographic locations
where Fabrikam employees work. The servers running SharePoint Server 2013 are located in Texas, USA.
Even though there are varying degrees of latency, performance is good for users across the globe. The
Fabrikam test results provide an example of systematic WAN testing by using a load test that is comprised
of a variety of SharePoint tasks that are important to the company.
Fabrikam is an example of a world-wide company that is succeeding with a central datacenter model,
instead of deploying SharePoint Server 2013 to multiple regions across the world. If you are considering a
move from a central datacenter model to multiple SharePoint sites in different geographical regions, make
sure that you conduct WAN testing to see whether it is really necessary.

9. Teck Resources—geographically dispersed deployment
Teck Resources is a mining company with many remote sites throughout the world. Many sites are
connected to the Teck Resources WAN by high latency and intermittent satellite connections. Mahmood
Jaffer, IT Specialist and SharePoint Architect with Microsoft Partner Softlanding, worked with Teck Resources
to design and support their global SharePoint architecture.
The description of the Teck Resources architecture includes several illustrations that might be difficult to
read within this article. These illustrations are also available in SharePoint 2013 WAN testing with Visual
Studio 2012 walkthrough.
Teck Resources uses two datacenters in Calgary, Canada, and Santiago, Chile. The following map shows the
two datacenters plus the 10 remote sites.
Even though some remote sites are located on the same continent as a datacenter, these sites rely on low
bandwidth connections or satellite connections that are intermittent. For sites shown on the map, WAN
performance prevents or discourages users from uploading content to a SharePoint site at one of the two
datacenters, or a site located at a nearby site.
Teck Resources weighed the costs and benefits of deploying many regional SharePoint farms compared to
not using SharePoint sites. For the mining company, the benefit of using SharePoint Server 2013 features to
manage content outweighs the administrative costs of deploying many farms to support the distributed
environment. In particular, the company relies on the following capabilities:
 Managed metadata—a standard tagging scheme that is applied to content so that assets can be
discovered and managed appropriately over time.

10.  Enterprise-wide search—the ability to discover content assets that meet specific criteria, which metadata
defines, and to know the mining sites that these assets are associated with.
Integrating the environment to support these features requires coordinating service applications at all farms.
The User Profile Service and My Sites are deployed to each farm. The User Profile Replication Engine is used
to synchronize profiles between the two datacenters, as shown in the following illustration.
Because the environment is distributed among more than three farms, there is no attempt to synchronize
profiles across all farms, that is, synchronize each farm with all other farms. Instead, each remote farm
synchronizes with only one of the two datacenters, as shown in the following illustration.

11. With this highly distributed environment, Teck Resources is willing to accept that there might be some
manual cleanup work with profiles as described in Global architectures for SharePoint Server 2013.
Search is an important component of the enterprise content management strategy of Teck Resources. The
company has to find assets that meet specific criteria and to determine the mining sites with which assets
are associated. Currently much of the historic data that belongs to Teck Resources resides on file shares. It
will take some time for the company to move the content to a SharePoint environment. Some assets might
remain on file shares indefinitely.
At the remote sites, search is deployed to each local farm and crawl rules are set up to also crawl local file
shares. The following diagram shows the configuration that is replicated for all remote sites.

12. Enterprise-wide search is provided at the company’s two datacenters in Calgary and Santiago. Search at
these datacenters is configured to use either federated search or remote result sources to display results
that are associated with each remote site. Remote result sources are used for the sites that have reliable
WAN connections. Federated search is configured for sites with intermittent satellite connections. Federated
search is configured to show results in a separate Web Part which provides a visual indication of whether the
remote site is connected or disconnected at the time of the search.
The following diagram shows how enterprise-wide search is architected to include results from all remote
sites.
The relationship of the two datacenters to each other is not included in the illustration. Each datacenter uses
remote result sources to include the other datacenter in search results.
Finally, the Managed Metadata service application is integrated by deploying it to the central farm in Calgary
and then sharing this service application to all other farms in the environment. The Managed Metadata
service application is one of the few service applications that can be shared across farms that are separated
by WAN links.

13. One issue that Teck Resources reports with this configuration, however, is that the Managed Metadata fields
and tagging are not available to remote farms when a satellite connection is disconnected.
Khan summarizes the design challenges for Teck Resources: “Because Teck Resources supports the
collaboration needs of occasionally connected offices or offices with extreme latency due to the use of
satellite links, we needed to build an architecture that was flexible while minimizing the complexity as much
as possible. The WAN improvements helped Teck Resources consolidate some of the remote farms, but not
all. The result is two central sites that act as the social hub for a number of smaller farms. This provides a
somewhat cohesive social experience while supporting the goal of providing remote office users with access
to SharePoint sites even when disconnected from the ‘hub’.”
See also
Global architectures for SharePoint Server 2013
WAN performance and testing for SharePoint 2013