More Appliance Challenges
2) Appliance designs are inextricably tied to single applications
- each service or application requires a custom-designed appliance
- new systems software must be written, tested, debugged
- often can share hardware, but entire system must be retested
- especially difficult to design new self-maintaining appliances
- performance and manageability suffer when an appliance is used for other than its intended purpose
- e.g., if workload doesn't quite match appliance design goals
- example: using a file-server appliance as the storage subsystem for a database application