Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Appliances

Appliances seem to be a hot topic at the moment; manufacturers are falling over themselves to come out with an appliance that sits in the data centre with minimal management overhead and levels of performance that are unsurpassed. This ranges from specialised XML accelerators to Google's appliance.

There is a natural trade off between the flexibility of a conventional server and the utility of an appliance; as a natural sceptic I remain unconvinced that in most cases it makes sense to use an appliance, but I am open to persuasion :-)