|
Eliminating Appliance Overload
Over the past few years, across enterprises of all sizes, hardware appliances have become the preferred deployment form factor for specialized IT functions such as messaging security. Physical security appliances provide a number of compelling benefits for enterprises—they are pre-configured, easy to deploy, simple to manage and usually offer a compact form factor. But the rapid adoption of appliances, particularly for security solutions, has lead to “appliance bloat”—racks and racks of multi-colored boxes, each performing a specialized function. As security threats have proliferated and as enterprises have deployed more and more appliances to combat these threats, the ease-of-use and management benefits that make security appliances so popular are at risk of being overwhelmed by the complexity and costs involved with managing a large number of “point solution” appliances.
Initial attempts at solving appliance bloat have focused on collapsing multiple appliance functions onto a single physical appliance. Today’s most prominent examples of this would be messaging security appliances, which typically combine anti-spam, anti-virus and outbound content filtering on a single box, and unified threat management (UTM) appliances, which usually combine firewall, IPS and other network security functions.
While these multifunction appliances decrease the raw number of appliances required to run applications, their implementation still requires the addition of hardware to the data center.
The Dawn of Virtual Appliances
Along with consolidation of functionality in the messaging security space, there has been a trend in the industry around virtualization. At its simplest, virtualization is an abstraction layer that takes an enterprise’s applications and operating systems and decouples them from physical hardware. This decoupling allows your IT resources to have greater flexibility. It turns a physical machine into a file (a “virtual machine”) that can be installed on top of a virtualization layer. Those files can be provisioned and operated side-by-side with other virtual machines on the same pool of hardware resources.
One natural evolution of the virtualization trend is to combine the benefits of special-function appliances and mix them with the virtualization approach. Hardware appliances are a great way to encapsulate a customized operating system, required services and an application. Virtual appliances are that encapsulation applied to the virtual computing world.
With virtual appliances, enterprises can simply install “hardware-free appliances” on their existing virtualized server infrastructure. Virtualization technology, such as VMWare, transforms a mix of industry-standard x86 servers and their associated processors, memory, disk and networking components into a pool of “logical” computing resources that can be dynamically allocated to different virtual machines (each of which might be running entirely different operating systems, applications and services).
Many of today’s hardware appliances are based on standard x86 server hardware running a customized OS and specialized applications and can, with a small amount of effort on the part of vendors, be transformed into a virtual appliance. Everything about the solution—operating system, application, user interface—is the same as it would be with a physical appliance, except that it requires no dedicated physical infrastructure.
Introduction to Virtualization
Let’s take a step back and look at what virtualization is and why it’s become such a popular strategy in today’s enterprise IT environment.
IT organizations are still grappling with the legacy of the IT explosion of the 1990s, which left many of them with high costs, slow response times, and an inconsistently managed infrastructure. Today, IT organizations that want to give their enterprise a sustainable competitive advantage need to:
o Reduce infrastructure costs through more efficient use of resources.
o Respond faster to business needs so projects get deployed more rapidly.
o Increase the consistency and predictability of operations.
Virtualization platforms, such as VMware Infrastructure, allow IT teams to continuously consolidate workloads to maximize server utilization and decrease operational costs. They allow system administrators to manage a higher number of servers, and deliver more flexibility and responsiveness in provisioning new software services and maintaining existing ones. Most importantly, they standardize and simplify the management of diverse x86-based environments across all types of operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris x86, Novell NetWare and specialized operating systems used in virtual appliances.
|
