Computer Appliance - Types of Appliances

Types of Appliances

The variety of computer appliances reflects the wide range of computing resources they provide to applications. Some examples:

1. Storage appliances provide massive amounts of storage and additional higher level functionality (ex: Disk mirroring and Data striping) for multiple attached systems using the transparent local storage area networks paradigm.
2. Network appliances are general purpose routers which provide firewall protection, Transport Layer Security (TLS), messaging, access to specialized networking protocols (like the ebXML Message Service) and bandwidth multiplexing for the multiple systems they front-end.
3. Anti-spam appliances for e-mail spam
4. Virtual machine appliances consist of a "hypervisor style" embedded operating system running on appliance hardware. The hypervisor layer is matched to the hardware of the appliance, and cannot be varied by the customer, but the customer may load other operating systems and applications onto the appliance in the form of virtual machines.