Enterprise Server -- Enterprise Server provides load balancing and 4-node clustering capabilities. The products that implement these features are Sun Cluster for clustering, Solaris Resource Manager for load balancing, and Solaris Bandwidth Manager for IP traffic management. Enterprise Server also supports 64 CPUs and 64GB of maximum addressable memory.
The focus of this white paper is on Solaris 7 with Easy Access Server 3.0 and Solaris 7 with Enterprise Server version 1.0. Enterprise Server provides high availability, reliability, and scalability features. These products are best compared to Windows NT Server 4.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise edition.
A key difference between Windows 2000 and Solaris 7 with the server extensions is pricing. When compared to the nominal cost difference between Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, the cost difference between Solaris Easy Access Server and Solaris Enterprise Server is quite significant. Solaris Enterprise Server is also considerably more expensive than Windows 2000 versions that support load balancing and clustering, namely Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.
As the white paper will show, Solaris server products make only a cursory attempt at providing customers with an integrated administration solution. The limited solutions that are available require considerable Unix expertise. Most of the services are simply provided as add-ons and lack common management interfaces. The Solaris product documentation makes it quite clear that the server extension products are simply add-ons of applications that run on top of Sun Solaris.
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