* One solution to alleviate appliance bloat is to use virtual appliances
Virtual appliances cure appliance bloat
By Sandra Vaughan
Over the past few years hardware appliances have become the preferred form factor for deploying specialized IT solutions. Appliances are preconfigured, easy to deploy and simple to manage, and usually offer a compact form factor.
However, the rapid adoption of appliances, particularly for security solutions, has led to appliance bloat — racks of multicolored boxes, each performing a specialized function. As enterprises deploy more appliances, the ease-of-use and management benefits that make security appliances popular are at risk of being overwhelmed by the complexity and cost involved with managing a large number of point solutions.
One solution is to use virtual appliances. They let enterprises install hardware-free appliances on existing virtualized server infrastructure. Virtualization technology, such as that of VMware, transforms a mix of industry-standard x86 servers and their associated processors, memory, disk and network components into a pool of logical computing resources that can be dynamically allocated to different virtual machines (each of which might be running an entirely different operating system, applications and services).
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