Rack, Stack, And Go Back: Why Hardware Appliance Strategies Don't Work Anymore

By Amit Pandey, CEO, Avi Networks

During a recent cab ride, a colleague and I chatted about the combination of external factors that made companies like Uber possible. To technologize the mundane cab ride, Uber required ubiquitous cellular networks, mobile devices and apps, GPS and mapping services, and simplified credit card transactions to come together. A set of synergistic technology changes and market trends are leading to similar fundamental shifts in enterprise computing.

Application Services In Data Centers

Enterprise infrastructure consists of bare metal servers or virtual machines in the compute layer connected by the underlying network along with the necessary switches and routers to manage access controls or traffic flows. Applications are then deployed with various essential services such as storage, security, and load balancing provided by service-specific appliances. This operational model for the enterprise data center has remained the same for a long time. While virtualization drove significant changes in extracting better utilization from physical compute layer, the rest of the data center services did not change much. These application services provided by dedicated hardware appliances became the norm upon which applications were deployed. The focus by the appliance vendors was on extracting the best performance and throughput possible from the hardware with custom FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). Higher performance requirements demanded better hardware and thereby higher costs.

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