The fact that they were pretty inexpensive didn't hurt, either. By putting their software on an appliance, vendors know exactly what type of hardware and software the device is integrating, which enables them to better support the software. A perfect example of this is Oracle's raw iron initiative. Most companies run only the database application on their database servers. Realizing this, Oracle partnered with Sun Microsystems Inc. in recent months to strip down the Solaris kernel and integrate it withOracle8i.
Customers receive a box that begins to work as soon as they plug it into their networks.
Enterprise administrators benefit from lower administration costs and can gain more uptime because extraneous software components that could negatively impact the database are eliminated. The Oracle idea is one that we'll probably see more often. Seldom are enterprise applications installed along with other applications on a server. The natural progression of this is that we will see specialized servers that are optimized for specific applications. Some servers may have beefier storage subsystems, while others may have a lot of memory bandwidth.