What do you consider "Enterprise"?

[LordSplodge]

I take it that was not a school funded by the UK Department of Education?

Yes it was, but because of was a failing "Inner City" school it had money thrown at it like it was going out of fashion (one year I had an ICT budget of £120K - not bad for a school, eh?)

Did naff all for the grades and it is a shame they didn't spend some money on decent wages for me and the techs.

True, im at one of them! lol. Just testing the water with that comment as there are some members on here who are VERY elitist with enterprise level stuff.

People love to bleat on about how they work in this "enterprise" or that "enterprise"... it would upset them to find out a lowly school has some enterprise kit, wouldn't it?

 

[Shaz]sigh[]

Yes it was, but because of was a failing "Inner City" school it had money thrown at it like it was going out of fashion (one year I had an ICT budget of £120K - not bad for a school, eh?)

Hmm... Enterprise to me is a sales moniker for high revenue customers (or employee count). In that respect, £120k is nothing.

One of the JV contracts I'm working on has just spent £300k on a DR project. This contract is only a small part of the business and only supports 400 odd users but the contract is worth £700m so in that respect, £300k is nothing too.

The main business has just spent £5m on a revised infrastructure. The business is worth over £2b. Therefore £5m is a relatively small investment too. Swings and roundabouts.

The school I used to be IT Manager at had an Apple XServe, Exchange 2003 (and 2007 just before I left) , a NAS box a Google Box, Terminal Server, SharePoint sever, SQL Server and a cluster of AD servers, of course!

Again, not to pick on you but that isn't really Enterprise kit, it's just a list of services. Enterprise kit is more about resiliency, performance and guaranteed availability. That's what you pay for.

 

[bigredshark]

Enterprise, well putting aside SME, I'd consider nothing less than 50 servers, backup datacenters for DR, multiple sites (probably in multiple countries). But it is just a sales tag for decent kit, I've designed solutions for 50 users organisations using 'enterprise' kit because they wanted the resiliency and there are plenty 400 user organisations out there running on non enterprise kit (not in a million years are netgear switches enterprise equipment)

 

[LordSplodge]

Again, not to pick on you but that isn't really Enterprise kit, it's just a list of services. Enterprise kit is more about resiliency, performance and guaranteed availability. That's what you pay for.

Of course 120K is nothing. It was a secondary school for the love of the Goddess!

Funnily enough with a clustered set of domain controllers, a resilient network and a fallback Exchange server based offsite at the LEA the network had good performace, was resilient and whilst not guaranteed (at least not by me I wasn't going to stick my neck out) it had (or has?) a very high level of availability.

Just saying it is how much something costs is what makes it Enterprise smacks somewhat of the elitist attitude that BoomAM said exists.

 

[bigredshark]

Of course 120K is nothing. It was a secondary school for the love of the Goddess!

Funnily enough with a clustered set of domain controllers, a resilient network and a fallback Exchange server based offsite at the LEA the network had good performace, was resilient and whilst not guaranteed (at least not by me I wasn't going to stick my neck out) it had (or has?) a very high level of availability.

Just saying it is how much something costs is what makes it Enterprise smacks somewhat of the elitist attitude that BoomAM said exists.

Well given it's a marketing tag the price is highly relevent.

That aside schools aren't enterprise level for a pretty simple reason. Who cares if the network goes down for a few hours? It doesn't matter very much still.

Enterprise it matters if you have any downtime, they calculate losses of millions of pounds an hour if they loose internet access. When you're working with a target of five and a quarter minutes unplanned downtime a year, thats enterprise level requirements.

Having a few redundent links running OSPF is one thing, tweaking your routing protocols so they reconverge in under half a second is an enterprise level requirement.

My point is, just having some cisco kit running a routing protocol and a few terabytes of SAN doesn't make it enterprise IT...

 

[King Arthur]

Enterprise is more to do with the size and spread of the company than it is to do with technology, so any IT infrastructure built to support a large >500 userbase usually geographically dispersed or over multiple locations.

i agree with this, working in IT sales, this is the kind of business we target as "enterprise". Anything less in classed as SMB (small to medium business)

Phil