Just a few years ago, the cloud cognoscenti guffawed when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison introduced his “cloud in a box.” The general consensus was that anything tied to a particular piece of hardware can’t be regarded as a real cloud. Cloud tends to sit on faceless, nameless commodity hardware, or so the orthodox view held. But in recent years things have gotten a little more nuanced, and a number of vendors are now offering cloud appliances. The growth of so-called converged infrastructure offerings has been a pragmatic response to the fact that, for a number of enterprises, a known logo on the box, a packaged offering, and vendors who support both hardware and software are attractive.
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