"Maybe this was some mis-marketing on the industry's part," Jenkins said. "There was an aura that appliances would be simple, like a toaster simple, when in fact, the types of tasks appliances were used for required a hell of a lot of consulting."-- Server appliances die a quiet death
I never understood the "logic" behind dedicated 1U units for mail, http, caching, DNS, "XML Acceleration" or other task-specific functions. Apparently, not many customers (er, people-with-wallets-running-datacenters) did either.
Auspex, OTOH, deserve to go.
-Dom
Re:Not NetApp!
ziggy on 2002-11-01T17:06:23
Storage appliances and networking equipment aren't in the same category as "brain dead server appliances". NetApp and Cisco boxes do make sense. It's the appliances that claim to "just" need power and pipe to provide email/caching/web/database/etc. service don't make sense.I hope NetApp don't go down the pan. They're one of the best pieces of kit I've ever used!Re:Not NetApp!
Matts on 2002-11-02T14:46:33
Don't be so sure.
We're seriously considering adding an outgoing caching smtp server solution to our mail server racks, simply because the appliance gives amazing performance.
Of course the marketing says it gives amazing performance, but at $40K for a box to do 10m outgoing emails a day, I'm fairly sure we can put together a cheaper box that does the same for less dough. Of course whether it's worth doing that or not, given that $40K is a small (though significant) part of the cost of a rack of email servers, is another question.
The nice thing about SMTP though is it naturally extends to this kind of middleman system. Other protocols aren't so fortunate.
