HP have released a new sizing and configuration tool for SharePoint. I've run through my initial thoughts on this. Their microsoft product page is here with further details.
Business Profile
Interestingly the quoted SMB as up to 1,000 users, Mid-market to 1,000 - 20,000 users (peak usage of 3:1) and Enterprise as anything bigger than that.
User Requests Per Day
The problem I see with the estimations is that it's kind of chicken in the egg. It really does depend on how much they roll out in SharePoint on how many average user requests per day. Even looking at data from existing Intranets is not a good basis as these are typically static and managed by a select user base. Rolling out SharePoint then opens up this management to the entire organisation which therefore encourages more use and therefore affects statistics.
Solution Component
This page tries to break down how the product is going to be used, interestingly it doesn't really cover off Business Intelligence as a separate functional area which could potentially be quite an overhead on a server (I'm assuming this is covered in the Web part classification). The issue here is there are so many variables in terms of whether there are complex workflows involved in document submissions etc. that it does really make it hard to narrow this down.
Usage Characteristics
These Usage Characteristics are basically geared in favour of HP selling more kit and are probably a bit top heavy for a standard SharePoint roll out. The high availability option is the key explosion to the farm topology on this screen and reading a few articles on this is probably a good way forward as this will greatly affect the number of servers you require.
Interestingly, even though I ticked I didn't anticipate frequent indexing, it still put in a separate indexing server because of the 'high availability' option I'm guessing. It does seem a bit excessive in terms of 3 blade servers for the front end for a 15,000 max user SharePoint site. Joel Olsen goes into this in detail.
