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Ask HN: What does enterprise-grade mean?

3 points by zxienin ↗ HN
I am hearing term "enterprise-grade" a lot, but its unclear what precisely it means. Or even in commonly understood colloquial terms.

Is it only marketing moniker when you want to move/expand into enterprise? From a development and architecture point of view, what difference you have experienced - building consumer grade and enterprise grade?

12 comments

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chrismatheson
It costs more
zxienin
in return for..?
PaulHoule
Longer support.

Better support.

Management tools.

Better reliability.

Higher memory bandwidth (but maybe higher latency)

Also sometimes then scale is just different. For instance there are 18TB helium filled enterprise hard drives you could put in a desktop computer. The average person might fill a 2TB drive, but you have to be an accomplished downloader to fill an 18TB drive.

zxienin
What would be tangible difference in building & architecting software? Longer/better support, management tools are day 2 concerns.

Better reliability - I've seen more reliability in google mail, than one of my travel expense business application that is sold as enterprise grade.

wmf
In terms of reliability, "enterprise-grade" tends to mean "applied high-availability best practices from the 1990s" and those practices aren't nearly as effective as people thought they were. Basically none of that stuff was tested to destruction Jepsen-style and we now know that it won't survive. As long as everybody was following the same practices you could pretend that it's not possible to do better, but later Google and others showed that it is in fact possible to achieve much higher availability using different practices.
brudgers
Economic viability for the vendor. If a vendor has ten customers and ten engineers then each customer needs to be paying:

(one engineer's salary + overhead) * profit

each year. Every rational economic actor knows that whether they are selling or buying.

zxienin
I doubt that can be used as differentiating factor of enterprise-grade..
sushshshsh
Marketing-speak that implies that somehow since a corporation pays salaries to employees to make this software, it must be better than anything else in 100% of cases.