Good article on Appliances.
From PCWeek...
Enjoy the references to NTAP.
Steve
Info appliances plug in
Compact devices blend single purpose, ease of use
By Pankaj Chowdhry, PC Week Online
September 27, 1999 9:00 AM ET
The new favorite of corporate IT departments is the "set-it-and-forget-it" information appliance—a specialized server that performs just one function but does it very well.
The deployment across the enterprise landscape of appliances that perform as storage-, database-, e-mail- or Web-only servers is driven by both customer and vendor needs. Vendors want more control over the environments in which their applications run, and customers appreciate a box that takes about as much work to set up as a coffee maker and begins to work as soon as it's plugged in.
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True appliances, such as Network Appliance's F760, on the other hand, use a specialized and often proprietary component to aid in their single tasks. For Network Appliance, that component is the WAFL (write anywhere file layout) file system, which allows the F760 to write to disk faster than most traditional operating systems. The WAFL technology gives the company's appliances an edge over other multipurpose computers. In fact, in tests for our review of the F760 last fall, it was one of the fastest file servers we had ever seen.
Even more important, installing the F760 was shockingly simple. The file server appliance's entire operating system fit on a floppy disk, and getting it on our test network took less than 2 minutes.
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FULL TEXT @
zdnet.com |
