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HARDWARE Appliances are evolving to offer businesses new ways to cuts costs and improve performance. However, integrating with existing systems can be a challenge
Computing appliances are gaining a foothold in enterprise IT systems because of their simplicity, reliability, ease of use and lower cost compared with general purpose computers.
The appliance is basically a self-contained IT system that can be plugged into an existing IT infrastructure to carry out a single purpose, making it comparable to a consumer appliance such as the toaster.
The appliance is designed to address a specific IT operation from within a closed architecture that may contain an operating environment, storage and specific applications. The appliance's purpose could be to provide additional processing power, network storage or monitoring, or anti-virus and security.
As a concept, the computing appliance is not new; in fact, home users were the early adopters of many appliances with such things as games consoles, the iPod, or TV set-top boxes.
Among businesses, appliances have largely been adopted to carry out networking functions. For example, special-purpose router appliances from suppliers such as Cisco and Nortel have almost entirely replaced general purpose computers for packet routing.
Other examples of network appliances include network fax servers and network back-up servers. The modern printer can be viewed as a network appliance, plugging into the network rather than into a general-purpose computer.
Appliances have also become popular for network storage, with firms like Network Appliance (NetApp) producing the Windows or Unix-based network storage appliance, formerly referred to as a filer.
There are now signs that the appliance is ready to evolve as software firms such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are starting to show interest in them.
John Enck, a vice-president and research director at analyst firm Gartner, said that this year, "IT managers should expect to be deluged with a new wave of server appliances offering everything from simple single-function operations - for example, file servers, Java Virtual Machine processing and so on - to completely integrated applications, operating systems and hardware systems."
According to Enck, after an unsuccessful run in the early 20005, application and hardware suppliers are now returning to the appliance model for financial reasons. Software suppliers are eyeing the hardware revenues, and hardware suppliers are...