Red Hat provides four different products for the Enterprise. Their different server products are identified by two-letter combinations that are supposedly not acronyms, but which I will expand anyway because it's easier to remember them if you have some sort of mnemonic. At the top of the pyramid is Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, which I think of as their Application server product. Red Hat AS supports systems with up to 16 CPUs and 64GB of main memory. We received a pre-release of the 4.0 version of this product for this review. Red Hat AS is server-rich and comes with various Java bells and whistles that are discussed later in this review.

Moving down the Enterprise Linux food chain is Red Hat Enterprise ES, which I think of as their Enterprise Server product. It supports systems with up to 2 CPUs and 8GB of main memory, and is targeted towards small or medium-sized business server systems who use it to run network, file, print, mail, and Web servers. Next, crossing into the desktop space, is Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, which I think of as Red Hat Workstation.

WS supports systems with up to 2 CPUs, but does not provide many of the software servers that the higher-level products include. The list of missing servers include FTP, OpenLDAP, DNS/bind, TFTP, PXE, and INN. At the bottom of the Enterprise line comes the RHEL Desktop product, which is sold in quantities of 10, 50, and presumably higher numbers if you'd like. This is designed to run on single-CPU systems with up to 4GB of memory. It includes the things you expect to see on Linux equivalent of a Windows desktop--a mail client (evolution), an office productivity suite (OpenOffice), an instant messenger client (GAIM), a Web browser (Mozilla, currently), and other standards like Adobe Acrobat, Real Player, MacroMedia Flash support, and so on.

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