Re: External Load Balancing

["Paul D. Robertson" <paul () compuwar net>]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Mark Teicher wrote:

> A majority of vendors who build appliances build it for one reason.  They
> do not have to hire a bunch of highly skilled technical people for customer
> support.  Provide a nice color glossy diagram with lots of circle and

No, they build it because it sells to people who don't understand that
packaging it with hardware and pre-installed doesn't really affect the
overall care, feeding or security aspects one little bit, other than the
fact that you're hooked into the vendor's idea of support.

Let's look at the last few SQL worms and their effect on appliances before
we all go marching off singing songs of praise.  Care to count the number
of compromised door badge reader "appliances?"

Operating systems are enough of a commodity now that "appliance" doesn't
buy you much of anything.

> arrows, and the customer(s) are enjoying their appliance purchase, not
> unlike the early days of firewalls, where most companies stated: "Oh yeah
> our stuff works on that variant of Unix or Windows"  But in reality, one
> needed a Phd to configure the underlying O/S just the right way before the
> firewall application could be installed, all this with technical support on
> the phone or on site.

Back in those days, a good consultant could do the deed and leave the
customer with a point of contact with clue.  But really that was just lack
of engineering in an installer.

My home firewall is sold as software, an appliance from the
vendor or an appliance from a third party.  Buying the appliance version
changes where you get hardware support (and how difficult sparing and
repair are) and that's about it.

I don't recall ever needed tech support for anything other than bugs...

Paul
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul D. Robertson      "My statements in this message are personal opinions
paul () compuwar net       which may have no basis whatsoever in fact."
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