For those of you who are not familiar with them, Inkra (http://www.inkra.com/) and Nexsi (http://www.nexsi.com/) are "next generation" services switches. They provide load balancing, firewalls, SSL, VPN, etc -- in a shared environment -- all in one network device.

What do you all think of solutions like that versus Best of Breed? When I was in high school I worked at Circuit City selling stereos, and I always preferred individual components over those all-in-one systems.

But in a case like this, does it make sense to save data center space by throwing as many enhanced services into one box (1 pair of 6U boxes versus a couple of racks worth of equipment), versus using individual boxes for each service, even if you have to sacrifice some functionality in those services?

Hmm, I'd probably rather have seperate boxes..because if you dropped the all-in-one thing...err you're done, but if you dropped one out of your 3-4 things..not as bad

Originally posted by mkaufman
Hmm, I'd probably rather have seperate boxes..because if you dropped the all-in-one thing...err you're done, but if you dropped one out of your 3-4 things..not as bad

Hopefully you aren't taking them out of your rack often enogh for dropping them to be a problem :)