Welcome to this new project! Since I have been in the enterprise IT area for many years, I imagine I can put some ideas out regarding technologies and things that are being used in this area. First, these are my thoughts and you may not agree with them - no flaming please. Second, this is enterprise focused and not SMB (Small Medium size Business). Therefore stability, availability, maintainability, and integration are more important than fancy or "hip" technologies - no Apple products.
In the past few years, virtualizatoin is king. Not only is this the method du jour for Intel-based platforms, but other "large iron" platforms as well. In the area of storage, Storage Area Network or SAN has been around for years. But recently, Network Attached Storage NAS has been making an inroad in the enterprise arena as well. There is also a move in combining network and storage into something called Unified Fabric. These are some of the areas more related in hardware that an enterprise may employ.
Somewhere between the hardware and the OS is the hypervisor. This isn't really a different topic years ago, but due to the virtualization trend, there are choices now in this arena. Mainframe has have z/VM for years. On the Unix platform, Power/VM has also been around for many years and making IBM Power system something of a favorite in many enterprises. Of cause, VMWare's vSphere/ESX is the favorite son on the Intel/AMD-based platforms and Hyper-V and all others being relegated the "also runs" category.
In the area of operating systems, most enterprises use a variety different ones. Some will use z/OS, if they use mainframes. Many will have a mixture of different Unix variants, such as AIX, HP/UX and Solaris. Of cause, more and more enterprises are starting to use Redhat Enterprise Linux in their production environment and finally, let's not forget the hundreds and thousands of Windows servers that are already in-place. One area that separates an enterprise from a SMB is precisely in the area of integration - making all these platforms work collaboratively in a manageable, maintainable, and predicable manner.
In terms of application software, many enterprises choose to use Lotus Notes. I don't understand why Notes instead of Exchange, but I suspect it is due to IBM's predominate presence in most enterprises, the unwillingness to change, and LotusScript's perceived usefulness as a light programming tool. In the area of databases, Oracle is the reigning king here with SQL Server perceived as the light weight database useful only on Windows. Websphere is also portended to rule in the application server space and IIS is rarely seen outside of Project server and SharePoint server deployments. MQ Series, TIM/TAM, AD, TSM are also the tools of choice for most enterprises.
I have specifically left out the whole of networking here. In general, most shops will use Cisco and that's the end of the conversation.
This is a work-in-process and is not meant to be exhaustive. Please leave comments and suggestions.
