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”

Hollis sums up his comments by suggesting that at its simplest level there is a basic trade-off when comparing hardware appliances versus virtual appliances. The trade-off is the old, tired, expensive adage – “Got an IT problem? Throw more hardware at it.” What that adage misses and what Hollis highlights is that immediate potential gratification from the “hardware fix” generally has no long-term strategic value.

Haff’s analysis of Hollis’ and EMC’s position points out that these hardware appliances or “bundles” as he calls them, “increase a vendor’s footprint and reduce the opportunity for others” in the data center. As we are all aware, in order to be a good corporate citizen in the data center today, a smaller footprint and the ability to nimbly work with and increase interaction with other technologies are must haves.

So this begs the question (and we hope that those of you reading this blog will offer up some answers): “What are the major obstacles that IT managers face when trying to break their dependency on single-function hardware appliances?” We’d love to hear your thoughts.