Why the Software Industry Is Building Appliance Solutions on Commercially Available Hardware

Enterprise IT managers are under pressure to accomplish more each year with budgets that are being held to little or no growth. Thus, they must find new solutions that are more efficient and more cost-effective. Appliance servers are proving to be cost-effective solutions, particularly for applications such as security, search, video streaming, storage, networking, and others. Appliances provide solutions that are much easier to install, run, and manage than the typical mix-and-match software and hardware solutions. This simplified environment lowers time to solution for new software applications and decreases management costs for IT. The industry has historically built these solutions as a closed environment with custom hardware and software optimized to run together.