How Many Appliances Do You Need?
from the excess-hardware dept
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. There was even one company selling a blogging appliance (hitting both hot trends in one shot). Basically, these appliances were simply taking software that the company wrote and putting it on a cheap computer. Every one of these appliances seemed to come in a different day-glo color, making you wonder if they all coordinated before hand, so that the fluorescent orange appliance didn't get confused with the pearly white one. It made some of the attendees wonder what sort of CIO wanted a rack full of these different appliances (no matter how colorful). However, some apparently believe that going the appliance route makes sense. It's not clear why, though. While the claim is ease of setup, it seems like it only makes things much more complex down the road. You suddenly have to manage ten different boxes when you could have done it just fine with one or two boxes and some software.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Appliances make sense
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
Even though you can run multiple server applications on a single box, that has the problems that (1) it is often difficult to establish troubleshooting demarcation, (2) especially on Windows, server applications don't always play well together, and (3) Windows' process scheduling is still awful, and a single CPU-bound process can affect every other application running on that box.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Halfway between appliance and single box....
[ link to this | view in chronology ]