Now that we've explored the reasons why an SOE is important to the enterprise and understood at a high level the solutions for these problems, let's look in detail at an SOE. We will begin by defining the SOE itself.
What is an SOE?
Defining the SOE
Let's take a quick look at this from a more practical standpoint. As we have already said, an SOE is a concept, not an absolute. It is, at its simplest level, a common server image or build standard that is deployed across a large number of servers throughout a company. Here, all required tasks are completed in a known, documented manner.
To start with, there is the base operating system—and, as we have discussed, there are hundreds of Linux distributions...