Platform editions
The Hornbill Platform is offered to customers in two specific editions, referred to as Standard and Enterprise. Both editions offer the same levels of availability, security, data redundancy features, and uptime guarantees. For organizations deploying one or two primary applications, the Standard Edition meets their needs; our applications are optimized to run at scale on this edition. However, for some customers, either because of scale or because of complexity of the workload, the Enterprise Edition may be more appropriate or even required. The fundamental difference between the Standard and Enterprise editions is configuration of compute resources, with the Enterprise Edition tuned and resourced for the higher demands of system scalability, performance, redundancy, and MTR that enterprise organizations demand.
Standard Edition architecture
The Standard Edition is the typical configuration for most customers using a single primary Hornbill application. Users access their application data through the application logic and a database, which is their primary database. The primary database (based on MariaDB) is a single transactional relational database that serves both transactional as well as read queries. For light to medium loads, workflows, and data sets, this configuration offers ample performance and reliability.
Enterprise Edition architecture
The Enterprise Edition is a more modular, horizontally scaled configuration, designed primarily to much greater transactional and query throughput, while also separating, balancing, and tuning compute resources to more equally match individual customer instance workloads. In addition to the configuration differences, there are a number of additional features offered that require more compute resources to function adequately and that are typically only demanded by enterprise organizations where higher levels of security, auditing, compliance, and performance at scale are required.
Platform edition feature matrix
The following feature list provides a side-by-side comparison of the two editions to help you evaluate them.
Scalability and architecture
Standard |
Enterprise |
|
|---|---|---|
| Compute nodes/memory sharing | Up to 8 instances | Up to 4 instances |
| Storage technology | SSD | NVME |
| Storage configuration | RAID 5 | RAID 5 + 0 |
| Active database server | Single | Multiple |
| GEO Replica DR | Single (remote DC) | Dual (remote and local) |
| Collaboration, application, and process users | Suitable for up to 500 users | No limit |
Main features
Standard |
Enterprise |
|
|---|---|---|
| Collaboration | Y | Y |
| Task Management | Y | Y |
| Free applications | Y | Y |
| Premium applications | Y | Y |
| Shared mailboxes | Y | Y |
| Document Management | Y | Y |
| Reporting & Scheduling | Y | Y |
| Advanced Analytics | $ | Y |
| Advanced Reporting & Delivery | - | Y |
| Direct Database Access | - | Y |
Integration
Standard |
Enterprise |
|
|---|---|---|
| iBridge Cloud Integration Basic | Y | Y |
| iBridge Cloud Integration Premium | $ | $ |
| Enterprise Orchestration Integration Connectors | $ | $ |
Security
Standard |
Enterprise |
|
|---|---|---|
| TLS encryption | Y | Y |
| Single sign-on (SAML 2.0) | Y | Y |
| Data encryption at rest (AES-256) | Y | Y |
| IP access controls | - | Y |
| Advanced security compliance (Note 1) | - | Y |
| Advanced DR (priority recovery)(Note 2) | - | Y |
| Security audit reports and extended audit storage (Note 3) | - | Y |
| Extended mobile access controls (Note 4) | - | Y |
Choosing the right platform edition for your organization
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. It’s important to say that the Standard Edition of the Hornbill platform is robust and capable; it scales well for many hundreds, even thousands of concurrently logged in and active users. So for most needs, the Standard Edition is more than adequate. However, in environments where you have large numbers of very active users, or where you have many complex workflows, large data throughput, large transaction volume (such as logging larger numbers of requests), handling large volumes of emails, orchestrating larger volumes of automations and workflows — these will all be driving factors of the Workload/Workflow axis. The point at which a customer will benefit from, or need the Enterprise Edition will be different for each customer, each instance, and each situation.
You may also require the Enterprise Edition at a smaller scale if you need the more advanced security features, or the guarantees for faster/prioritized system recovery in the event of a DR situation.