Where would you find "enterprise" level servers/network equpiment?

[Jeff7181]

What's the smallest type of application an enterprise level server or network would exist? Local branch of an ISP? Network on a college campus? At what point does Opteron/Xeon type stuff not get the job done?

 

[ultimatebob]

Well... Banks and other financial institutions are a good example of someone that would want an "enterprise" level server. They want near 100% uptime, and multiple redundancies to prevent any data loss from hardware failure or network/power outages.

That doesn't mean that standard issue Opteron or Xeon servers can't get the job done, though. You'll just need a lot of them set up as a cluster with failover capabilities, like Google has their servers configured.

 

[mchammer]

Yea I would guess eventually big institutions would get sick of messing around with x86 PC's and get some REAL computers.

IBM zseries... drool...

 

[Jeff7181]

I see, so the major difference is reliability in terms of both uptime and data integrity rather than actual differences in hardware?

 

[mchammer]

The hardware is different, I don't know too much about it though. I do know that it is possible to do all kinds of exotic things like change bad memory while the computer is still operating. It is even possible to change processors while the computer is operating!

All of the "innovations" that come out for x86 like virtualization have been in big iron for over 30 years.

 

[Zugzwang152]

dammit.

 

[mchammer]

Originally posted by: Zugzwang152
dammit.

 

[drinkmorejava]

meh, before my neighbor's hosting company merged with the other top provider in the state, I know they had a pretty huge itanium setup to monitor all the traffic. Wasn't exactly a small environment though.

 

[Zugzwang152]

Originally posted by: mchammer

Originally posted by: Zugzwang152
dammit.

posted the wrong reply in this thread, hence the edit out.