Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

Appliances are complex combinations of hardware and software that enterprises put into production environments to meet specific—and often critical—computing needs. Offering high performance and reliability with minimal IT involvement, appliances are the delivery vehicle of choice in several key segments of the technology industry, including security, storage and telecommunications.

To deliver top performance and maximum business value over time, however, appliances need some care and feeding. Most often, this takes the form of periodic software patches and updates. But due to how appliances are designed, built and deployed, keeping their software up to date presents some unique challenges to software vendors and to their enterprise IT customers.

This white paper outlines the main challenges involved in appliance update management and details the approach NEI has taken in overcoming those challenges.