Virtual v’s Physical Appliances – 4 Compelling Reasons for Change
Scalability and Mobility
Organizations generally grow in size. However, they can also shift laterally with personnel from one department being redeployed to another department. This kind of growth can create considerable scalability headaches for the IT department. Effectively, demand for a particular server, such as the email security appliance, can grow dramatically overnight. Other influences, such as an increase in email due to a promotional activity, or a sharp increase in spam due to certain spamming campaigns, can also increase the load on a given appliance. The ability to be able to increase the physical characteristics of the platform or migrate an appliance from one server to another larger one, provides a fast and effective mechanism for dealing with demand. Being able to instantiate an additional anti-spam server can also assist with short-term demand and offers a fast route to load-balancing.
