A dedicated and integrated software and hardware stack has taken the industry by storm, Netezza as one of the first out with an appliance for data warehousing. Oracle introduced the Exadata product that is an integrated software and hardware stack for both data warehouses and OLTP systems. Oracle then introduced an integrated application server hardware and software stack called Exalogic. So why not use an appliance for integration? Cast Iron Systems already offers 'integration as an appliance' with a product called the Cast Iron Integration Appliance.

Although new to the market, the Oracle Exalogic platform is already being viewed as a potential integration appliance. This is because the Exalogic machine runs the Oracle SOA Suite which has the OSB and Oracle BPEL Process Manager for integration. As the capacity of the smallest Exalogic configuration (96 cores in a quarter rack), Exalogic as an integration appliance only makes sense in high volume environments that require millisecond processing time. This is because Exalogic is not an inexpensive machine. The minimum configuration, called a quarter rack, has eight compute nodes (96 cores), 768 GB of RAM, 256 GB of FlashFire SSD and 40 TB of disk storage

How Exalogic and Cast Iron mature as integration appliances will be interesting to watch. It will also be interesting to see if other pure-play integration appliances emerge in the market place. Or perhaps other major IT vendors such as HP and Microsoft will introduce integration appliances.