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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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The popularity of hybrid appliances is such that Forrester Research analyst Robert Whitley now sees OEMs starting to offer basic appliance architectures that vendors can use to enter the appliance market quickly and affordably.
"We are beginning to see 'meta-OEMs' offering off-the-shelf appliance architectures," Whitely says. "You can see the same code and the architecture over and over again in different appliances." This commonality, he fears, erodes the security credentials of appliances. "Should a vulnerability be found in one of these appliance architectures, you could have a wide-scale problem," he says, citing the much-loathed scramble-to-path operating systems.
And while proponents of the hybrid and pure approach to appliances share the same vision, the potential for this kind of vulnerability fuels friction between the respective camps.
"It is harder to build from the ground up but you get better results than just jumping on the flavour-of-the-month appliance bandwagon."
The counter-argument in favour of hybrid appliances is that the expense of "pure" appliances can be crippling.
"I have customers with 1GB of RAM they took from a server on their desks and they ask me, 'Can I put this in my appliance?'" Mike Bessey, systems engineer with e-mail management appliance vendor IronPort, says. "I have to tell them that we build with pre-fixed configurations and there is nothing you can do about it. The appliance might no even recognise new RAM."
Nor can the appliance accept a new processor or other quick performance-boosting upgrades. "We say that if you want more performance, you have to go buy a bigger, better IronPort," Bessey says. He also concedes that physical failures for appliances can be costly. "A PC server uses a AU$20 network interface card. If it breaks, you buy another one. If the network interface on an appliance motherboard goes, you might need a whole new motherboard."
