CPE Solution
MTU Key Benefit




Benefits
Security Appliance
Storage Appliance
Server Appliance

Ease of Administration
Price/Performance
System and Data Availability
Rapid Deployment and Scalability
Low Total Cost

Benefits of Networking Appliance
The goal of building an appliance has these benefits: ease of administration, high performance with cost-effective hardware, high system and data availability, rapid system deployment and scalability, and low total cost of storage ownership. These features combined with the performance and reliability benefits that cannot be matched by any general-purpose file server.

Administrators will find it easy to use because operating system components and architecture is eliminated to file service; even some options related to file service have been simplified. This removes the complexity of partitioning disk drives and assigning the partitions to different users to examine or recover old versions of their files without help from the system administrator. Logical partitions can be expanded and shrunk dynamically with zero downtime.

To obtain high performance at a reasonable cost, the appliance uses real-time running on standard-based hardware. Performance is improved by eliminating unnecessary features such as virtual memory. Compared to complex architectures that increase expense and reduce reliability, software optimization has proven to be a significantly more cost-effective approach for obtaining higher performance levels.

The appliance approach improves data availability. A general-purpose computer has so many different features and applications that it is impossible to test all possible usage patterns. An appliance can be tested much more thoroughly and less chance of failure because it does just one simplified function. Appliance protects against data loss caused by disk failure. Its ability to boot in just a minute or two further reduces downtime when a system failure occurs or when a system upgrade is being installed. The appliance approach also significantly minimizes planned downtime when compared to conventional storage subsystems.

Appliance installs within an hour, so administrators need not spend days setting up system groups and volumes. Storage can be added dynamically to any file system with a single command. Adding storage incurs no system downtime and does not impact performance or normal operation. Because it is network-attached, application servers can be dynamically added to the environment with zero downtime and significantly less effort than traditional SAN solutions.

The appliance architecture results in low cost by offering both a low initial investment cost and significantly lower operational costs. Examples of lower operational costs include: Minimal system management, Deleted files can be retrieved easily without resorting to tape, File systems can be instantaneously reverted to a previous point in time, and quick recovery from application corruption issues.