We read with great interest a recent blog from analyst Gordon Haff from Illuminata on the CNET Blog Network. Gordon’s blog entry, entitled “EMC vs. the big appliance“, highlights the battle for data center footprint between a single-function server appliance, a general purpose server and a virtual appliance. The blog details some comments from EMC’s Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis’ blog where Hollis talks to some of the negative “features” of a single-function server appliance, including:
- No single function hardware server appliance are built the same way
- None of the manage or are managed the same way
- None are supported the same way
- None work together in a cooperative way
- None offer standardization at different layers of the IT stack
- None have flexibility of workload resources built-in
- None are what any of us would consider “bleeding edge”
