Know Your Options

Computerworld - Technology products are generally implemented either as appliances or as software applications. It's vital for companies to understand the differences in cost, performance, security, installation, maintenance and support for these two different approaches as they make buying decisions.
Software vendors typically offer customers only the products they sell. Each product is often just a small piece of the larger puzzle of implementing a complex technology system. The customer is left with the burden of supplying all of the other components, such as hardware, databases and storage. Each of these components can add a significant amount to the total cost.
In contrast, appliance-based systems usually come as stand-alone, dedicated machines that may not require additional hardware and software. They may, however, have specialized ASICs or hardware built in, and they may have higher initial costs. And many customers may not want extra hardware in their data centers, and they may be able to reuse existing servers, databases and storage.
Appliance-based products are designed for only one standard platform, whereas software-based systems must support hundreds of combinations of hardware and software.
Appliances can be implemented based on the knowledge of the underlying hardware. This gives the customer tremendous leverage in the performance optimization process. Appliance vendors typically provide only a few choices of hardware platforms, but if it gives the customer the ability to acquire high-performance hardware, sometimes it is a better way to go.
The life expectancy of a default installation of Linux -- meaning the time it takes for the host to be compromised -- is approximately three days. For default installations of Windows operating systems, it's much shorter, usually minutes.
For this reason, appliance vendors usually take special precautions to equip their products with minimum configurations that feature only essential tools and utilities. They may also harden the operating system to allow only authorized access.
In contrast, software is generally installed on the customer's own servers. And the burden of securing these servers falls on the customer. Software may be an option for organizations that have standardized security hardening policies and whose employees have security expertise. For other environments, an already hardened appliance might be the better choice.
In a complex technology acquisition, the installation and configuration is often the most time-consuming phase of the project. Appliance-based technologies are designed to spare users the pain of selecting hardware, installing an operating system, keeping patches up to date and handling general system administration tasks.
Software products, on the other hand, require a complex installation process that includes these steps: obtain