Computing appliances promise simplicity, but do they deliver? Simon Sharwood investigates.
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Contents 
Introduction
A changing market
The appliance-making appliance
Do they really scale?
The ease-of-use myth
Walking the appliance road
Taking a holiday from spam
What about the disks? |
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Even with this array of tools, you'd be limited in your choices. Pot roast, after all, is nice but it does not produce properly golden potatoes. You see because most people like their potatoes golden brown, they will purchase an oven for roasting, the same as they will buy a toaster for toasting, a kettle for boiling water, and a range of other kitchen appliances. Some even go so far as to invest in rice-cookers, bread makers, and other specialist appliances because they believe they do the job better than generic tools and leave the stove and the oven free for other tasks.
Vendors of computing appliances hope you think the same way about your data centre. Most will tell you that servers are like stoves: they put out plenty of processing heat but require the specialist software "implements" to create anything useful. Managing that hoard of implements and juggling for space on the stove creates management issues.
It's certainly a catchy message and one with impressive commercial credentials.
Cisco and its networking brethren, for example, are basically appliance companies. Their routers and switches perform functions that were once the province of servers, but do so in a sealed box that packs plenty of computing power, but has absolutely no pretensions to performing the server's Swiss-army-knife trick of tackling any processing task.
Network Appliance is another vendor that made its name and a considerable fortune spruiking the simplicity of appliances, sparking the flattery of imitation from even industry giant EMC. The likes of Google and Nokia also offer appliances, for search and security respectively, while in recent years dozens of others have arrived in the market with appliances performing tasks as varied as bandwidth management, e-mail security, anti-virus and DNS serving.
All use the same core arguments to support their approach: appliances are simple devices that do one thing well and remove the hassle of tuning, maintaining, and securing an operating system. Appliance vendors are also unanimous in asserting that their products need only be connected to a stray port on a switch to commence operations and then require almost no maintenance.
