The concept is simple enough. You take a dedicated piece of hardware, load it with software to perform a specific function and, voila, you have an appliance.

And while the drawbacks are well-known and obvious -- management and power consumption top the list -- the past few years have seen veritable bumper crops of appliances in the channel, with the technology extending beyond its traditional role as fast, easy storage to encroach on such diverse functions as application acceleration and business intelligence/ERP.

"Customers don't want to get hit with hidden costs, don't want products that require a system integrator to install and most importantly they don't want to take unnecessary risks," says Jim Sherhart, director of product management at PowerFile, maker of the new Hybrid Storage Appliance. "When you consider the success of NetApp, it's safe to say that the appliance model is proven, and I think buyers take comfort in that."

While most users see appliances as adjuncts to their traditional infrastructures, specialists like NetApp have long touted building entire data centers on the appliance model. The company has an appliance for everything from business and engineering applications like SharePoint and electronic design to infrastructure functions like data backup and server virtualization/consolidation.

And even though the leading vendors of traditional server and storage architectures have quite a vested interest in keeping things the way they are, the data-center-as-appliance model seems to have enough legs that they are willing to at least give it a try. IBM, for example, recently launched the new Smart Cube, an application appliance built on either the company's Power-i system or the x64/Linux format and designed to offer complete data center functionality in a box. The Power-i system combines 4.2 GHz Power6 processors with 16 GB of memory, eight disk drives and four 1 GbE ports, while the x64 unit sports either dual- or quad-core Xeons, 8 GB or memory and four 500 GB drives -- certainly enough to get a small organization off the ground, and not a bad solution for a larger firm looking to kit a remote office or get a new business unit up and running quickly.

Some firms are also looking to appliances to shore up their holds among the various business software platforms. If a client is already heavily invested in Oracle running on Sun machines, for example, an easy way in would be for a rival hardware maker to launch an Oracle-specific appliance.

HP is taking that tack with its new XML Accelerator tailored to SAP's ERP and Netweaver Process Integration platforms. The device lets you offload CPU activity during large data conversions on multiple XML variations, tightening latency and boosting overall performance. And the unit is based on the ProLiant DL850, which makes it easier for clients to turn to HP if they are ever in need of a future hardware expansion. If the system is a success, it's a safe bet that HP will launch similar appliances for Oracle, Microsoft and other XML-based systems in the not-too-distant future.

Appliances are also gaining stature due to their compatibility with that other major trend sweeping the IT industry: cloud computing. For both in-house or external cloud architectures, appliances have a knack for getting users up and running quickly without a lot of complications.

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