" IT appliances are already there. A router is just a network appliance for sending and receiving packets efficiently. There are also specialized computing platforms for storage, search, security, e-mail management, data analytics and system management. They all have similar objectives: do a few things very well in order to outperform a general-purpose computing architecture that relies on layers of software to perform the same tasks. Think of it as a race between processor cycles applied to specialized tasks, and the same cycles applied to generalized tasks. A general-purpose architecture has to cope with a much wider range of usage scenarios. On the other hand, appliances don't have to be good at everything, just the functions incorporated in the devices. "
" The availability of industry-standard components and Linux have radically altered the economics of the appliance approach. Appliances benefit from the established set of monitoring and management standards that let them behave as good citizens in the network in a way that general-purpose computing platforms and software can't. "
" Think of the appliance model as the anti-virtualization strategy. As general-purpose computing platforms adopt virtualization to get higher levels of utilization for diverse workloads, appliance-makers target workloads that perform best on specialized platforms, and then build dedicated appliances for those workloads. "
" This is another of those sourcing dilemmas that CIOs often face. It would be nice if everything in an IT system was a software function that executed on industry-standard virtualized hardware pools. But if a company goes that route, it must depend on its software engineers for adequate performance and reliability, and it may never get enough of either. And software is relatively more expensive to acquire and support over an extended lifecycle. ... read the whole article
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