But the difference is these appliances come with the hardware and the software together instead of the general-purpose servers in the past. General-purposeservers tend to get burdened by trying to run too many applications at the same time, Xaing says. With a network appliance, you can take those parts of the applications off the general-purpose server. That gives more space for the server to do its core applications like computing or other, more complicated functions that require more memory and space, Xaing says. The chances of network appliances failing are few, and if they do, only one application is affected instead of the whole system being shut down.
Network appliances do provide users with a certain level of reliability, experts say.
In other words, it crashes as often as a washer or dryer malfunctions. Xaing says the benefits of using network appliances include ease of installation, very low maintenance and very low total cost in terms of both initial purchase and overall cost of ownership. Though still in the beginning stages of market acceptance, network appliance product lines are being developed by companies such as Oracle Corp., IBM and Intel, which are looking to capitalize on their potential. Linkins is a freelance writer in Austin, Texas. Web server Serves up Web pages many companies use Web servers solely for that reason.