Hornbill Editions

Hornbill 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 is perfectly adequate, 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 Configuration/Architecture

The the Standard Edition is the typical configuration for most customers using a single primary Hornbill application will be the Standard edition configuration. Users access their applications data through the application logic and a database which is their primary database. The primary database (based on MariaDB) is 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 Configuration/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 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 the differences between the two editions.

Scalability and Architecture

	Standard	Enterprise
Computer Nodes/Memory Sharing	Upto 8 Instances	Upto 4 Instances
Storage Technology	SSD	NVME
Storage Configuration	RAID 5	RAID 5+0
GEO Replica DR	Single (Remote DC)	Dual (Remote and Local)
Collaboration, Application and Process Users	Suitable for upto 500 Users	No Limit

Main Features

	Standard	Enterprise
Collaboration	Y	Y
Task Management	Y	Y
Free Applications	Y	Y
Shared Mailboxes	Y	Y
Document Management	Y	Y
Reporting & Scheduling	Y	Y
Advanced Analytics	$	Y
Advanced Reporting & Delivery	_	Y

Intergration

	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	Y	Y
IP Access Controls	-	Y
Advanced Security Compliance (Note 1)	-	Y
Advanced DR (Priorirty recovery)	-	Y
Security Audit Reports & Extended Audit Storage (Note 2)	-	Y
Extended Mobile Access Controls (Note 3)	-	Y
Extended Log retention	-	Y

Note

1. Advanced Security Compliance: extends our standard platform by facilitating deeper and more bespoke individual support for security-related needs, including additional service features to provide you with more find-grained controls over IP and mobile access etc. In addition, we provide more personalized support for security audits, and where appropriate, can facilitate you reviewing Hornbill’ own ISM and compliance stats (charges generally apply)
2. Instances running on the Enterprise Edition of our platform include a Hot Backup replica database running in the same physical location as the primary and replica databases. This means in the event of a system failure that requires a database/storage rebuild, your data is already in the physical location, so mean time to recovery is significantly faster than that on Standard edition, where the data is available in a remote data center and will need copying back to the primary DC for restoration. The transfer of data can take many hours for large data sets.
3. Provides more granular and lower level control over access to your instance, including mobile device and IP address restrictions and access controls and views

Choosing the right plaform edition for your organisation

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Its important to say that the Standard edition of the Hornbill platform is very robust and very capable, it scales really well for many hundreds, even a thousands of concurrently logged in an active users, and so for most needs 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 automation’s and workflows, 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.