“The term server appliance has been coined to refer to…
single-function servers whose market is predicted to grow to almost
$16 billion by 2003… Server appliances may take Windows NT onto
turf where it is not as competitive as other operating
systems…”
“To [International Data Corp.’s Dan] Kuznetsky, the right
solution sounds less like NT than it does Linux, for example,
or FreeBSD, or QNX. Microsoft’s competitive alternatives, according
to Kuznetsky, are Windows CE and embedded versions of NT. Windows
CE, he says, is not well-suited to the server-side, having been
designed for a single user. Windows NT, embedded or otherwise, says
Kuznetsky, has three primary problems: ‘It’s large, it’s big, and
it’s huge.’ “
“What’s more, adds Kuznetsky, a scenario where large, single
servers are replaced by several boxes does not make NT any more
competitive against free operating systems like Linux. To an OEM
manufacturing, say, 500,000 appliances, the difference between a
$1,000 operating system and a free one is clearly significant,
Kuznetsky points out.”
” ‘You could say that Microsoft has fed this,’ says Kuznetsky.
‘They said that the functional server approach was a way to build
NT-based applications. They chose a single function because NT
won’t scale as large as Unix, so [they said] the way to handle
large jobs is to split it over several machines. Once you’ve
accepted that, it is a very short step to [server appliances].’
“