iguration that generally has one of two topologies. The first is Thin Server, which is a specifically tasked network appliance that does very little processing for the connected Fat Clients, which are workstations that carry out all or most of the processing. An example would be a simple file server connected to a network of word processing stations. The second network design is Fat Server - Thin Client. This design has the server doing most of the work, either many tasks or one computationally intensive one. This allows a specialized server to more efficiently do the work and then send back to the clients the final information, thus keeping the network clear of unneeded data. An SQL server provides this service by taking an SQL query from a workstation and doing all of the necessary processing to provide the resulting record set. Larger networks are often a mix of the two configurations, using multiple servers.Comparing network/enterprise operating systemsEnterprise computing is dominated by IBM AIX 4.3.2, Compaq Tru64 UNIX 4.0F, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX 11.0, Silicon Graphics IRIX 6.5, Sun Solaris 7, and Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition. Linux does not yet fully compete in the highest end server class that handles hundreds, or even thousands, of users. The Linux community and other elements of the computing community think that this will soon change based on data gathered on OS performance and consumer demand.In April of 1999 the consulting firm D.H. Brown Associates Inc. conducted a rating of two major commercial Linux distributions, Red Hat Linux 5.2, and Caldera OpenLinux 2.2. They were compared against the six major commercial enterprise server OSs. These are IBM AIX 4.3.2, Compaq Tru64 UNIX 4.0F, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX 11.0, Silicon Graphics IRIX 6.5, Sun Solaris 7, and Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition.The study rated scalability; system management tools; reliability, availability, and serviceabili...
