How Many Appliances Do You Need?

personally I am skeptical that the appliance meme has legs... it just doesn't make sense to take a multipurpose compute server and turn into into a single purpose appliance. Appliance vendors claim that reduce maintenance workload is a big benefit, but how can they say that when the IT group is saddled with maintaining an increasing number of boxes by going the appliance route. Blades are a different animal altogether.

Link: How Many Appliances Do You Need?.

At the DEMO conference last month, it seemed like every company that wasn't pitching a blogging/RSS solution was selling some kind of "appliance" computer to stick in your rack.

Comments

[abhi]

Perhaps i'm missing the point of appliances - Why can't appliances be replaced by software services delivered over the net?

If it really does help to separate a particular appliance from the rest of your infrastructure and you also have issues maintaining a separate box. Then let someone else do this.

For example - a jotspot or socialtext based blog would be better than a blogging appliance.

I'm guessing secutiry/data issues might make this approach difficult.

[Jeff]

I think we are thinking about this the same way. There's always tradeoff one makes when going with a hosted service versus an implemented piece of software, but the larger point is that enterprise IT should start to emulate a shared services model for software, which is what I think IBM is doing a good job of promoting with their ondemand campaign.

[Randy Charles Morin]

Some believe in a Web-client, other believe in a native-client. I believe in winner is a Web-enabled native-client. MHO.