I don't have experience with this very implementation, but just adding my 2 cents: Consider presenting Drupal's multisite feature, which gives you the possibility to have multiple sites with one code base. This is very useful in cases where you need many sites with similar configuration, but still you want minimal maintenance costs.
However similar, and sharing one set of modules, you can still initiate the sites with completely different configuration, using Drupal's installation profiles. This way you can create new sites, destined for various tasks, as you mentioned: Departmental, personal, ad-hoc research teams etc.
Performance is obviously an issue, and will always be, but I found that using Drupal's internal caching system, together with server side optimization, and good hardware, can render any Drupal site fast enough.
I think you can find some more accurate statistics and benchmarking in Dries blog.
John Callahan wrote:
The University I work for is looking at various CMS solutions for several web needs, such as their primary websites, for colleges/department/research centers, for social networks, for student organizations, maybe even for individual student web sites. The idea is for the central IT group to host our primary sites and sites for smaller groups without IT experience... and to support others on campus who want to run their own servers/sites/databases. I have put together a few smaller Drupal 5 sites and have enjoyed my experience so far. So, I making a presentation to our Web CMS committee this Friday. (I believe they're also looking at Joomla, Plone, and a few commercial options; and we are testing Sakai for course management.)
I'm putting together the basics (basic architecture and IT requirements, pros and cons of Drupal, list of major Drupal web sites particularly academic sites) but I'd like to know if anyone else has done the same. What kind of feedback did you get? Are there are pertinent points not obvious to the beginning Drupal user (such as myself) that may be worth mentioning?
Scalability is also an issue. I don't know the traffic statistics but there will be a wide range of applications and volume; from our basic informational pages to social networks run by faculty/staff to small research groups. I've read on a few sites that Drupal does not scale well to high traffic sites, such as 15M+ hits/month or so. However, those references are a bit out-dated and I know The Onion, MTV UK, and others receive much higher traffic than we would.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
- John