Network technology-What makes the enterprise use networks? The question can be clarified as follows: When is the enterprise deployment of compute networks preferable to the use of standalone computers or multimachine systems? What new opportunities appear in the enterprise with
The advent of the network? And finally, does the enterprise always need a network?
If we do not go into particular, the ultimate goal of using computing networks at the enterprise is to increase the efficiency of its work, which can be expressed, for example, in increasing the profits of the enterprise. Indeed, if the cost of production of an existing product has decreased due to computerization, the time of development of the new model has decreased or the service of orders of consumers has accelerated, this means that this enterprise Really needed a network.
In a more detailed answer to the question “Why the Enterprise network?”, let’s start with consideration of the fundamental advantages of networks that arise from their belonging to distributed systems.
The conceptual advantage of distributed systems (and hence networks) to centralized systems is their ability to perform parallel computations. Due to this, in a system with several processing nodes in principle can be achieved performance, exceeding the maximum possible at the moment performance of any individual, as much as a powerful processor. Distributed systems potentially have better performance-cost ratios than centralized systems.
One more obvious and important advantage of distributed systems is their fundamentally higher fault tolerance. Fault tolerance refers to the ability of the system to perform its functions (perhaps not in full) in the case of failures of individual hardware elements and the incomplete availability of data. Redundancy is the basis of the increased fault tolerance of distributed systems. Redundancy of processing nodes (processors in multiprocessor systems or computers in networks) allows to reassign assigned tasks to other nodes if one node fails. For this purpose, dynamic or static reconfiguration procedures can be provided in the distributed system. In compute networks, some data sets can be duplicated on external storage devices on multiple computers on the network, so that if one of them fails, the data remains available.
The use of geographically distributed computing systems is more consistent with the distributed nature of application tasks in some subject areas, such as process automation, banking, etc. P. In all these cases, there are dispersed individual users of information-employees, organizations or technological installations. These consumers are sufficiently autonomous to solve their tasks, so it is rational to provide them with their own computing resources, but at the same time, because the tasks they solve are closely interrelated, their computing resources must be combined in Unified System. An adequate solution in this situation is the use of the compute network.
For the user, apart from the above, distributed systems also provide advantages such as the ability to share data and devices, as well as the possibility of flexible distribution of work across the system. This separation of costly peripherals, such as large-capacity disk arrays, color printers, plotters, modems, and optical disks, is often the main reason for deploying a network in an enterprise.
A user of a modern computing network is working behind his computer, often not aware of the fact that he uses data of another powerful computer, which is hundreds of miles away. It sends e-mail through a modem connected to a communication server that is shared by several departments in its enterprise. The user has an illusion that these resources are connected directly to his or her computer, or “almost” connected, because they need minor additional actions to use them, compared to using really own Resources. This property is called network transparency.
Recently, another incentive motive for the deployment of networks, much more important in today’s environment than the cost savings due to the separation of expensive equipment or programs between employees of the corporation. The motive was to provide employees with prompt access to extensive corporate information. In the conditions of fierce competition in any sector of the market wins ultimately that firm, whose employees can quickly and correctly answer any question of the client-about the possibilities of their products, about the conditions of its application, about the decision of any possible problems, etc. P.
In a large corporation hardly even a good manager can know all the subtleties of each of the products produced by the company, especially as their nomenclature is updated now every quarter, if not a month. Therefore, it is very important that the manager had the opportunity from his computer, connected to the corporate network, say in Magadan, to transfer the client’s question to the server located in the central branch of the enterprise in Novosibirsk, and promptly get Quality response that satisfies the customer. In this case, the client will not turn to another company, but would use the services of this manager in the future.
For such work to be possible, it is necessary not only the presence of fast and reliable connections in the corporate network, but also the existence of structured information on the servers of the enterprise, as well as the ability to effectively find the right data.
This aspect of network work has always been a bottleneck in organizing the delivery of information to employees-even with the existence of powerful DBMS information in them was not the most “fresh” and not the volume that was needed. Recently, there has been some progress in this area related to the use of Hypertext information Service WWW-so-called intranet technology.
This technology supports a fairly simple way of presenting textual and graphical information in the form of hypertext pages, which allows you to quickly place the latest information on the WWW-servers of the corporation. In addition, it unifies to view information with the help of standard programs-Web-browsers, work with which is not difficult even for a layman. Now many large corporations have already transferred huge piles of their documents to WWW-servers, and employees of these companies, scattered all over the world, use the information of these servers via Internet or intranet. By getting easy and more complete access to information, employees decide faster, and the quality of this solution is usually higher.
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