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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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Appliances may also require more configuration and maintenance than marketing messages would have you believe.
Most are certainly the subject of regular updates to firmware, even if those updates are not as voluminous or important as those Windows server users have become accustomed to.
IronPort managing director Mike Bosch also concedes that his devices require a little more work to set up.
"Our entry-level product comes with a single sheet with six instructions and that is about it," he says. "You open a hole in the firewall on port 425, connect it to your network give it an IP address, and redirect current mail from existing gateway to the IronPort."
To get the machine to perform productively, or to adopt policies previously embodied in software, can take longer.
"The one thing that may take some time is transferring the rules from mimesweeper," or similar content management applications that run on a server according to Bosch. "It can take a couple of days to convert previous inbound and outbound scripts to our mail filter."
Sven Radavics, director for sales security appliance vendor WatchGuard believes the end user should actually expect to spend more time maintaining appliances than marketers would have them believe. "Some of the marketing for appliances hurts the appliance story in the long term," Radavics says. "People see terms like 'plug and play' and get disappointed."
"A firewall appliance is performing a complex and important task. But to safeguard your security you really need to monitor the logs that it produces.
"We see people that never look at the logs. They have an attitude that this is an appliance they can set, and then forget," Radavics says, adding that this can increase the security risk.
Ongoing maintenance is another issue where appliances do not always deliver on their promise.
Gartner's Sargeant and Forester's Whitely both say that just because appliances require less support than servers, does not mean they don't warrant careful attention.
"Things still go wrong," Sargeant says. "And the more appliances, the greater the management requirement."
Most appliances will offer their own non-standard management consoles. Sargeant says this means that getting abreast of them can be a costly hassle.
Interoperability can also be a problem that can make it difficult to use complementary appliances alongside each other, or to build stacks of appliances that work together to provide a range of computing services.
"You should not expect your new shiny Juniper box to work alongside your old Cisco devices," Whitely says. "There will be a disconnect in the experience."
Appliance vendors are currently collaborating on management standards to allow greater interoperability and manageability -- an effort that is quite advanced in the storage arena but nascent elsewhere.
Other vendors are emerging specifically to deliver redundancy and manageability for appliances, achieving the latter by allowing appliances to be included in enterprise security policies instead of requiring individual configurations for appliances.
Overall, the trend is for GUI-driven management consoles to replace command-line interfaces, and for the use of standards that make it easier to virtualise appliances or manage them though overarching enterprise or network management suites.
