In Praise of Appliances
Don’t ask how it’s built. Ask what standards it uses.
SocialText sells a Wiki appliance. An appliance is a physical server with the operating system, database and application already installed. Usually an appliance is shipped as a blade that can be slotted into the standard blade server racks used at major Internet hosts.
Appliances are amazingly easy to use. You get it, you plug it in. You turn it on and you go.
The idea is simple. You shouldn’t have to worry about what operating system the server is using, what web server software it is using, what database it is using. Instead, it should be Apple iPod easy. Just plug it in, surf to an admin web page, configure a few minor things and you are ready.
Today, most IT departments don’t like appliances. They assume that they will be difficult to use, and maintain.
If you are running IT for a bank, why are you worried about maintaining the underlying nuts and blots of a blog server or a wiki server, or any kind of server?
That’s like buying a car and assuming that you are going to fix the engine, the brakes and the transmission yourself. Bankers don’t fix their own cars. So why do bank IT departments insist on getting so far under the hood of their server systems?
But what if the appliance breaks?
The simple answer is to send it back and ask for a new one.
But we’ll loose data!
No. A good appliance should be able to dump its entire data set to a standards compliant back-up drive on an on-going basis.
When the replacement appliance arrives via Fed-Ex, plug it in, point it at the back-up drive and you are up and running.
But what if we want to customize it?
If you really want to customize it, pay the appliance vendor to do the work for you. Or, if you personally want to do that kind of work, quit and join an appliance vendor.
But doesn’t this mean that I will eventually have Linux, Windows, BSD, Solaris and even Apple’s OS/X running in my environment?
Yes. And in the context of internally developed software, this would be a crazy approach. But the whole point of using Appliances is to never get down to that level. Instead, you should only deal with the Web based interface for the application. A Wiki server, a blog server, a Netvibes like content aggregation application, or a Joyent like email server would all lend themselves to deployment on an appliance.
The problem is a little bit that ’standards’ are the always the same. Many IT folks have made their experiences with standard compliant products that came with slightly different interpretations of the very same standard. It’s a matter of trust.
Appliances in itself are a great way of delivering a product. It doesn’t need to be hardware, but can be a virtual appliance as well.
Stephan,
Thanks for the comment.
You are right that all standards compliant tools are standard compliant, but some are more compliant that others. (one has to referance Orwell when talking about something like standard compliance).
However, just because it doesn’t always work perfectly, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use standards.
The benefits to be gained are simply too great.