This week, Hardware Today deconstructs the Top 10 buzzwords enterprises typically encounter on the server showroom floor.

1. Enterprise: Any medium- to large-sized company (or non-for-profit organization or government agency) dressed up for sales-time excitement. Admittedly, even we have a tendency to use "enterprise," primarily because it is more inclusive than business or company. However, try referring to your place of employment as "the enterprise" when talking to a co-worker first thing Monday morning. Slight hints of Star Trek take aim with tricorder accuracy at the stereotypical dorky IT professional; perfect for your mission. For some reason, small and medium businesses are generally described directly, albeit often shortened to SMB. The conundrum here is what to do if you operate a medium business, given that both ranges apply.

2. Base Price (AKA "From ..."): Starting price, which is typically much lower than the ultimate cost of the server. As an example, consider IBM's xSeries 365, a 4-way Xeon-based rack server with a base price of $15,999. Two processors come standard; upgrading to four adds $11,498 to the price. No operating system is included; Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition adds $3,209. Standard RAM is 2 GB; add a cool $28,788 for the upgrade to 32 GB. Six hot-swappable high-end hard drives, and the least-expensive keyboard and monitor bring the final price to $65,930.95, roughly four times the base price. Sure, an enterprise could opt for the less-expensive Linux OS, or choose less extravagant add-ons, but the point remains that it's easy to be lulled into spending $10,000 in add-ons for a server with a $10,000 base price.

3. Entry-Level: Bare minimum -- in some ways, barely a server. Dell, for example, describes its PowerEdge 400 SC as an entry-level value server. The "Small Business Value Server," with a $349 base price, is "Ideal for cost-conscious first-time server buyers with simple IT needs." In other words, this server costs next to nothing because it is capable of doing next to nothing. The product is described as "easy to set up, run, and troubleshoot" -- not much can run on it, so not much can go wrong. (It can function as a File/Print Server for up to 10 users, but so can nearly any modern computer.)

4. Mission-Critical: A militaristic way of saying high availability, which is itself a fancy way of saying that if the server crashes in production, it's bad. At the side of the server room opposite from entry-level servers, mission-critical servers are the Humvees of the server room, providing highway security overkill where a seatbelt might suffice (which is not to say that some situations do not require higher availability than others). Consider HP NonStop Servers, for example. HP claims its NonStop Servers can physically "eliminate" any threats to uptime. "With multiple levels of fault tolerance built in, your NonStop servers are designed to deliver 100 percent availability ..." it reads, "... But even the best redundant systems cannot, in themselves, eliminate every downtime threat to your strategic business operations."

But then the literature switches gears, away from the dire threat of violence and toward a kinder, gentler terminology: "That's why HP Mission Critical Services for NonStop Systems feature a holistic approach that addresses all the diverse factors that affect system performance and availability." Perhaps the "holistic approach" can be used to tend kindly to any wounded downtime threat attackers that the server had fended off, without having "eliminated."

5. Data Center: The latest glossy term for "server room." Other terms that have surfaced over the years include "server farm," "shop," "glass house," and "server closet."

6. Scale-Out: Modular, theoretically interchangeable, and lacking big stars, a scale-out model typically involves many 1- to 4-way servers instead of few more-powerful ones, as is the case with its scale-up sibling. Although scale-out represents a 180 degree turn from scale-up, it has not prevented vendors from sticking to both guns in their sales strategies. Consider this rather schizophrenic line in a November 17, 2003 press release from Sun Microsystems (which until last year was focused on scale-up): "Sun will continue to develop and deliver solutions for both scale-out and scale-up workloads with its UltraSPARC processor."

Server sprawl is a common byproduct of scale-out deployments, and questions like "Where's the print server?" are not unusual. Forrester Principal Analyst Frank Gillett sees scale-out as worthwhile, assuming disciplined management is employed. "Scale-out can work, if people approach it in a disciplined fashion, but IT has not been about discipline in the last decade, particularly in the Intel world," he says. "To get the next level of capability and cost deduction, you've got to get disciplined, about buying the right products, thinking ahead, choosing the right architecture, and reducing variability in your data center."