A little while back, Ingres and rPath announced Project Icebreaker the creation of a software appliance encompassing “the integration of the Ingres 2006 database with the Linux operating system”. In the past, I have always thought of appliances as being hardware related, but recent events have had me reconsidering this narrow definition. Under my old way of thinking I might have dismissed Icebreaker as something of a response to the difficulties of administering and maintaining a Linux system. However, some new developments have me thinking …

An applicance is the complete encapsulation of a business process, freeing the user to step back and look at the bigger picture. For a product like Netezza, this it pretty obvious that it is a complete RDBMS encapsulated in hardware black box. But, as hardware becomes more of a commodity, operating system configuration becomes more complicated, and virtualization becomes widespread, it makes sense that the definition of an appliance could migrate out of silicon.

Consider that Amazon Web Services are working on some very interesting projects, namely namely S3 (online storage) and EC2 (grid for rent). These projects have essentially abstracted the operation and maintenance of processing and storage. Icebreaker sounds ideal for this kind of enivronment. Thinking of the metaphor of the kitchen, it changes the role of the server from appliance to countertop.

OK, OK, this is just a jumble of random thoughts.  I have been trying all week to get these thoughts out and on to paper, pretty unsuccessfully.  The one thing I think I think is that there are some radical changes just over the horizon, based on the trends in web services, appliance-ization, and outsourcing.  Something big, something both familiar and new and unexpected.  I will have to think about this a bit more …

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 7:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Over the Horizon, Enterprise Web, SaaS, Appliances. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.