by Angela Guess
A recent article reports that “Physical appliances are fighting to hold their ground in the enterprise data center. The strength of virtualization seems unassailable: By abstracting processes from the underlying infrastructure, applications can be customized to fit user needs and business demands, rather than having to conform to hardware. Freed from physical constraints, applications can dynamically run wherever is most efficient. Technologies from firewalls to WAN optimizers to network management systems to routers that used to live on dedicated boxes are moving to virtual servers. The result is what every business is looking for: enormous flexibility and economies of scale. Why not go virtual whenever and wherever possible?”
The article answers its own question: “Because there are still cases where physical appliances pay off, thanks to specialization and customization. Without the overhead of virtualization or superfluous software processes, a dedicated piece of hardware will almost always perform a given task faster than software. And hardware that’s custom-designed for a single purpose–be it running the Oracle 11g database or examining packets for malicious content at wire speed–usually delivers the highest performance, albeit at a cost of less flexibility and a slower development cycle.”
