Appliances vs. Traditional Servers: Pros and Cons

Appliances vs. Traditional Servers:
Pros and Cons
© 2014 Hitachi ID Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Deﬁnitions 1
2.1 Enterprise Software Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2.2 Traditional Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2.3 Appliance Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2.4 Client Device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3 Types of Appliances 2
3.1 Home vs. Enterprise Equipment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3.2 Commodity Hardware vs. Specialized Processors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
4 Appliance Servers: Beneﬁts 3
5 Appliance Servers: Drawbacks 4
6 Summary 5
APPENDICES 6
A About Hitachi ID 7
i

Appliances vs. Traditional Servers: Pros and Cons
1 Introduction
This document is intended to help organizations decide whether an appliance or a traditional server is an
appropriate platform for hosting enterprise software applications. It is organized as follows:
• Definitions: defining relevant concepts and terminology.
• Types of Appliances: differentiating between different types of appliances and what they are used
for.
• Appliance Servers: Benefits: an overview of the advantages of hosting software on an appliance.
• Appliance Servers: Drawbacks: an overview of the drawbacks of hosting software on an appliance.
2 Definitions
A growing number of vendors are offering what would otherwise be software-only solutions in the form of
dedicated appliances, which incorporate both hardware and software. In this section, terms and concepts
relevant to appliances are introduced, so that the subsequent discussion can be more clear.
2.1 Enterprise Software Application
This document is concerned specifically with “enterprise software applications.” That is, applications which:
1. Run on one or more centralized servers.
2. Provide a service to many users, possibly distributed across multiple sites.
3. Must be scalable and reliable, because many users would be adversely impacted by loss of access to
the application.
At issue is whether it is preferable to host such applications on appliance servers or traditional servers, as
defined below.
2.2 Traditional Server
A traditional server consists of several components, possibly from different vendors, which may have to be
assembled into a unit by the organization which wishes to run the enterprise software application:
1. Hardware – such as X86-style servers – from vendors such as IBM, HP or Dell.
2. An operating system, such as Windows or Linux.
© 2014 Hitachi ID Systems, Inc.. All rights reserved. 1

3. Possibly a web server, such as IIS or Apache.
4. Possibly a database server, such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL.
Normally, an organization will have many such servers, and deploy one or more applications on each one.
The above description is only approximate. For example, hardware may be virtualized, other operating
systems are available and other components may be required.
2.3 Appliance Server
An appliance server is one where all of the required functional components, including those identified in
Subsection 2.2 on Page 1, plus the application software itself, are integrated and configured into a unit and
purchased from a single vendor.
2.4 Client Device
Users sign into applications using a client device. This may be a desktop or laptop PC, a telephone or smart
phone, a PDA, etc.
Modern applications often use a web interface to interact with users, which means that the user’s hardware
runs a web browser, which presents a graphical user interface to the user.
3 Types of Appliances
3.1 Home vs. Enterprise Equipment
Many home users are very familiar with appliances, if not with the term “server appliance,” in the form
of wireless routers, small hardware firewalls, print sharing devices, network attached storage, etc. These
devices are small, inexpensive and not really scalable or flexible enough to meet the needs of medium to
large organizations.
3.2 Commodity Hardware vs. Specialized Processors
Server appliances intended for enterprise deployment have two basic types:
1. Commodity server hardware, with pre-installed software.
2. Specialized processing hardware.
The commodity hardware approach serves mainly to reduce the initial setup and configuration effort for
organizations deploying the product. “Inside the box” is just a traditional software server, assembled and
supported by the vendor.

Specialized processing hardware is used mainly where the performance characteristics of the system can-
not be easily reached with a conventional server. This is typically required in the context of specialized
networking equipment, such as SSL processors, virus scanners, application firewalls and more, all of which
must perform complex at “wire speeds” – 100Mbps or more.
4 Appliance Servers: Benefits
The main benefits promoted by vendors who sell solutions in the form of appliances are:
1. Easy installation:
The operating system and application software are pre-installed on the hardware, which reduces
installation time and effort. To the extent possible, the software is normally either pre-configured or
self-configuring.
It should be noted that this is only a significant advantage for applications that require minimal integra-
tion with existing infrastructure, and minimal customization. Where such integration and customization
is required, it normally takes up the bulk of configuration time, so the savings from faster initial setup
is inconsequential.
2. Fewer skills required:
The simplified installation and configuration lead to scenarios where fewer IT skills are required to
implement the solution. This is particularly true where the application is quite simple and requires little
or no further configuration beyond initial activation.
3. Sole-source technical support:
Any questions about hardware compatibility or operating system patches are eliminated when a single
vendor supports every “layer” of the solution, starting with hardware and ending with the application
software.
4. High performance specialized hardware:
In the case of specialized processing hardware, the additional and overriding benefit is increased
performance. Note that this is not generally true for commodity hardware bundled as an appliance –
this advantage is only relevant where the appliance incorporates specialized hardware, most often to
provide a specialized network infrastructure function.

5 Appliance Servers: Drawbacks
Hardware appliances provide some benefits, such as somewhat simpler installation and configuration, but
they also have some drawbacks. These include:
1. Low performance commodity hardware:
In order to reduce manufacturing costs, hardware appliances often incorporate previous-generation
components. CPU capacity, memory cache, RAM and disk space are often significantly smaller in
an appliance as compared to a contemporary general-purpose server. The result is that commodity-
based appliances often have significantly lower performance than the same application software run-
ning on newly acquired commodity servers.
2. Poor hardware support:
Appliance servers are not developed, sold or supported by software vendors. Instead, this work is
contracted out to a hardware vendor who simply images the software vendor’s OS and application
onto their standard hardware, which is then branded as an appliance for that software vendor. Since
neither the software vendor nor the appliance hardware vendor (with few exceptions, such as Dell) is
likely to have local support staff in many cities, technical support normally leads to customers mailing
their appliance to a depot for repair or replacement.
The absence of a local support network, such as might be offered by a big-brand PC server manufac-
turer (IBM, HP, Dell, etc.). means that hardware repair takes at least 24 hours – the time required to
courier a replacement unit to a customer. This reduced SLA (Service Level Agreement) leads to the
next problem:
3. Difficult jurisdictions:
Delivery of hardware appliances to some jurisdictions may require import licenses, export licenses,
payment of duties, invoicing in local currency and may present a range of other challenges related
to physical delivery of advanced, cryptographic technology to far-away places. This leads to longer
lead times to deliver hardware to some locations in the world, higher cost and the need for more
locally deployed infrastructure, usually in precisely those locations that would not otherwise merit
extra capacity.
4. Expensive disaster recovery:
Because hardware repair cannot be provided promptly by either appliance software vendors or ap-
pliance hardware manufacturers, most vendors that sell appliance solutions encourage customers to
buy redundant appliances. This means that where a customer might normally deploy a single con-
ventional server, they must purchase and deploy two appliance servers for the same task, to get a
comparable assurance of availability.
5. Inability to virtualize:
Appliances are just that – pre-packaged hardware. This means that they cannot be virtualized. Orga-
nizations seeking to migrate their systems and applications away from raw hardware, and onto virtual
servers and perhaps private or public clouds, cannot do so with an appliance.
Virtualization offers some important benefits, so this can be a serious problem:
(a) Energy and space savings, from efficient use of hardware capacity.
(b) Flexible resource allocation, adding or removing CPU, memory and disk as required.

(c) High availability, with the ability to recover crashed applications in minutes or even seconds.
(d) Snapshot capability, so that bad configuration changes can be quickly rolled back.
Using an appliance negates all of these benefits.
6. Not suitable for high density server environments:
For many of the same reasons that organizations are increasingly using virtualization technology, they
are also using blade technology to increase the space and power efficiency of their server environ-
ments.
Appliances do not generally come in a blade form factor, so cannot contribute to a power and space
saving server management strategy.
6 Summary
There are specific use cases where appliances are attractive:
1. Deployment of simple applications, which require minimal customization and integration, into small to
medium environments.
2. Deployment of very high performance network devices, where specialized hardware provides a sig-
nificant speed boost.
There are also use cases where appliances are unattractive:
1. Deployment into high density IT environments.
2. Deployment into IT environments where virtualization is widely used.
Appliance based solutions reduce initial setup time, but increase hardware cost (for redundancy) and where
specialized hardware is not used, usually also reduce scalability.

APPENDICES

A About Hitachi ID
This white paper was produced by Hitachi ID.
Hitachi ID Systems, Inc. delivers access governance and identity administration solutions to organizations
globally, including many of the Fortune 500 companies. The Hitachi ID Management Suite is a fully inte-
grated solution for managing identities, security entitlements and credentials, for both business users and
shared/privileged accounts, on-premise and in the cloud.
The Management Suite is well known in the marketplace for high scalability, fault tolerance, a pragmatic
design and low total cost of ownership (TCO). Hitachi ID Systems is recognized by customers and analysts
for industry leading customer service.
The Management Suite is an integrated solution for identity administration and access governance. It
streamlines and secures the management of identities, security entitlements and credentials across sys-
tems and applications. Organizations deploy the Management Suite to strengthen controls, meet regulatory
and audit requirements, improve IT service and reduce IT operating cost.
The Management Suite is designed to efficiently create, manage and deactivate user objects, identity at-
tributes and security entitlements across systems and applications in medium to large organizations. This
is done using a combination of automation and self-service:
• Automation propagates changes from one system to another.
• Workflow invites business users to participate by completing their own profiles, authorizing changes
and reviewing the current state of users and privileges.
• Consolidated management enables security staff to manage access with a user-centric, rather than
application-centric view.
• Password synchronization and enterprise single sign-on reduce the number of passwords that users
must remember and type.
• Reports enable auditors, security officers and system administrators to analyze current state and
review historical changes.
A rich set of connectors are included, to easily integrate with most common systems and applications and
to manage credentials including passwords, challenge/response profiles, biometric samples, OTP devices,
PKI certificates and smart cards.
The Management Suite is designed as identity management and access governance middleware, in the
sense that it presents a uniform user interface and a consolidated set of business processes to manage
user objects, identity attributes, security rights and credentials across multiple systems and platforms. This
is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Management Suite Overview: Identity Middleware

Employees, contractors,
customers, and partners
Users Hitachi ID
Management Suite
Target Systems
Business processes
Synch./Propagation
Request/Authorization
Delegated Administration
Consolidated Reporting
User Objects
Attributes
Passwords
Privileges
Related Objects
Home Directories
Mail Boxes
PKI Certs.
The Management Suite includes several functional identity management and access governance modules:
• Hitachi ID Identity Manager – User provisioning, RBAC, SoD and access certification.
– Automated propagation of changes to user profiles, from systems of record to target systems.
– Workflow, to validate, authorize and log all security change requests.
– Automated, self-service and policy-driven user and entitlement management.
– Federated user administration, through a SOAP API (application programming interface) to a
user provisioning fulfillment engine.
– Consolidated access reporting.
Identity Manager includes the following additional features, at no extra charge:
– Hitachi ID Access Certifier – Periodic review and cleanup of security entitlements.
* Delegated audits of user entitlements, with certification by individual managers and applica-
tion owners, roll-up of results to top management and cleanup of rejected security rights.
– Hitachi ID Group Manager – Self service management of security group membership.
* Self-service and delegated management of user membership in Active Directory groups.
– Hitachi ID Org Manager – Delegated constuction and maintenance of Orgchart data.
* Self-service construction and maintenance of data about lines of reporting in an organization.
• Hitachi ID Password Manager – Self service management of passwords, PINs and encryption keys.
– Password synchronization.
– Self-service and assisted password reset.
– Enrollment and management of other authentication factors, including security questions, hard-
ware tokens, biometric samples and PKI certificates.
Password Manager includes the following additional features, at no extra charge:
– Hitachi ID Login Manager – Automated application logins.
* Automatically sign users into systems and applications.
* Eliminate the need to build and maintain a credential repository, using a combination of
password synchronization and artificial intelligence.
– Hitachi ID Telephone Password Manager – Telephone self service for passwords and tokens.
* Turn-key telephony-enabled password reset, including account unlock and RSA SecurID
token management.
* Numeric challenge/response or voice print authentication.
* Support for multiple languages.

• Hitachi ID Privileged Access Manager – Control and audit access to privileged accounts.
– Periodically randomize privileged passwords.
– Ensure that IT staff access to privileged accounts is authenticated, authorized and logged.
• Group Manager is available both as a stand-alone product and as a component of Identity Manager.
The relationships between the Management Suite components is illustrated in Figure 2 on Page 9.
Figure 2: Components of the Management Suite
www.Hitachi-ID.com
500, 1401 - 1 Street SE, Calgary AB Canada T2G 2J3 Tel: 1.403.233.0740 Fax: 1.403.233.0725 E-Mail: sales@Hitachi-ID.com
File: /pub/wp/documents/appliance-vs-server/appliance-server-pros-cons-1.tex
Date: 2008-10-20

Appliances vs. Traditional Servers: Pros and Cons

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