Kurt Shintaku's Blog

re:  SharePoint® Server 2007 for Search Document Scalability

We have confirmed that SharePoint Server 2007 can crawl & parse through 50 million documents in a single index, dependent on hardware, however there remains no technically enforced document limit for SharePoint Server 2007.  Deployments above 50 million documents are actually possible on a custom solution basis and as commodity PC hardware capabilities grow, since this is all software-based, the scalability of Sharepoint naturally grows with Moore’s law.  And of course SharePoint Server 2007 supports multiple indexes for even greater scalability.

This is a really big deal for Enterprise/Intranet Search, folks.  Let me repeat a few points here about Sharepoint Server 2007’s Search Engine capabilities:

• Scalability that grows with Moore’s law – because of it’s usage of ANY commodity hardware
• Almost TWICE the scalability of "the other guy’s" search appliances
• Multiple index capabilities on the same hardware
• No upper-end limit on document count for the Enterprise edition of Sharepoint, meaning you can index as many documents as you want without any artificial limitations.

And remember:  You don’t need to buy a special appliance to get this level of scalability and it can be done on the hardware that you use today for any of your IT servers.