What is an SOE?

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.

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...