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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 manageability and scalability of the appliances is also being questioned, especially by justifiably cynical IT professionals who have had experience with supposedly well-architected systems fail to scale, supposedly secure systems breached, or encountered maintenance issues with products promoted as either highly manageable or bulletproof.
IronPort's Bessey believes one manageability issue is actually created by the fact that appliances are so locked down.
"Customers ask if they can run a script to deal with the one weird thing in their environment they can't do without," he says. "With a general-purpose computer or an almost-appliance you can add applications. But the more appliance-like it is, the less you can put your own stuff there." The result can be inflexibility that either creates the need for a hard-to-manage work around or robs a business of some nice-to-have functionality.
Paul Wilkinson, a senior consultant with Dimension Data, also recommends caution when considering appliances because the concept alone does not deliver security.
"I have seen a few presentations from appliance vendors, and they always say Windows is a risk and attracts attacks because it is the most common platform. Then they tell you they are secure because they have their own code," Wilkinson says.
"For me, that means appliances have a lower target profile but it does not mean that its code is actually better."
Wilkinson therefore warns customers to be a bit careful. "Challenge vendor's claims," he suggests, adding that he feels appliances can sometimes introduce unwelcome complexity to an enterprise. "If you are a large organisation and decide to use appliances for one or two roles, you can create islands that create a new management challenge."
"I don't think end-users are thinking about scaling or redundancy with appliances," Gartner's Sargeant says.
Network Appliance's Bracken agrees. "We had a customer with a fully redundant failover implementation of our appliances, but then someone did an upgrade to all of their DNS servers," Bracken recalls. "There was no change control -- some of the authentication servers failed over, some did not." The result was chaos for users.
"It was a process problem, not a tech problem," Bracken points out. "But this was an example of a customer making a very carefully planned [upgrade] but failing to include appliances' dependencies in their plans."
Bracken also admits that appliances do not free an organisation from the need to plan large-scale implementations.
"Imagine you want to use appliances as storage devices in remote offices and then mirror that data back to a central appliance at head office," he says. "You can't do that unless you start out with the business requirement so you know if you are doing it to replace tape at the edge of the network to improve restore times."
Once the business requirement is in place, the other IT tasks required will be much easier to identify.
"You'll identify a need for a bandwidth utilisation strategy; maybe consider how to use Peribit's bandwidth-management appliances to help," Bracken says.
"So there is planning involved. If all you are doing is replacing a file server with network attached storage it is a no-brainer, but for wider use, some planning and optimisation of third party components is necessary."
This need for planning evokes the scalability issues often associated with many Windows NT 4.0 installations. Departments will create solutions to meet their needs, but implementations designed for single servers would then struggle to scale when pressed into wider use across an enterprise. This is a result of businesses failing to appreciate the necessity of creating enterprise-scale architecture to deliver enterprise- class performance.
"It's a fair assessment to say that deploying appliances to repeat the success of a small implementation risks repeating the Windows scenario," Forrester's Whitely says. He says would-be users must therefore consider an enterprise-wide appliance plan just as they would consider a plan for an enterprise-wide client/server architecture.
