Brian, good article about appliance servers, very hot product. My turn to nitpick, as I just got done chiding Gottfried a bit :-) Another merit is that to expand functionality with applications servers, users simply add physical hardware, which creates much less risk of generating systems-related problems.
I haven't seen too much non-physical hardware in my time. Sometimes, microcode is categorized as something "in between" hardware and software, but, nah, to that author's readers, "physical" hardware is pretty redundant.
Back to the appliance servers, these are fueling a pretty good debate as to what will win out, NAS (appliance servers) or SAN (storage attached to servers through fiber optic switches, rather than direct). My opinion is they both grow like mad for years.
Tony |
