nging from the home office do-it-yourselfers to enterprise administrators.A network operating system is software that provides centralized services to a group of linked computers. The group may be only one other computer or several hundred. A server OS satisfies three categories of demand. A personal or home office server provides network functions to two to five users. This level of service can be handled by all newer desktop operating systems like standard Linux, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Windows NT Workstation and Windows 95/98, Macintosh OS, BeOS, QNX, and any microcomputer flavor of Unix. A small business server handles under 50 users and an enterprise server 50 or more. Novell Netware, Windows NT, and other scalable server solutions will handle various numbers of small business user loads. At a certain point a business will require an enterprise server product. This OS will be capable of handling massive user traffic and provide a total solution: a comprehensive set of software tools that will allow a business to be run using computers. An enterprise OS will be run on a minicomputer such as the HP9000 or a super-microcomputer with large data processing capacity like a multi-processor Alpha Chip-based machine. Enterprise computing is a term describing a set of software tools with a network OS at its core. Enterprise computing provides not only a place to store and share files but everything required for a business to gather and manipulate information throughout the business as well as Internet access for customer support and business-to-business data flow. An enterprise computing product is generally made up of the network OS and components that provide one or more of the following: file service, print service, Web page hosting, Internet access/firewall, mail service, backup, and database, and/or SQL database services. A server is, as the name implies, a provider of computing resources. It is part of a client-server network conf...
