BrainBlog article for Kemp Technologies by Jason English
We’ve seen many of the technological advances described in the Star Trek milieu become reality over the last 50 years, from personal communication devices and instant translators to GMOs, medical robots, 3D printing and weapons that stun.
But, ah yes, the matter transporter. By far, the invention that captivates us most. 
If you could say “Beam Me Up” and have Scotty or Geordi instantly transport your whole body from a hostile planet back to the spaceship in orbit, with mind intact, how cool would THAT be?
Most of us would be thrilled to transport our way past the next traffic jam.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing matter transport arrive anytime soon for personal use, but it already exists for a critical part of your application experience. Look no further than the load balancer appliance, once confined to a pizza box unit in your on-premises server rack.
From Physical to Virtual Appliances — and Beyond
Traditional data center applications had a single hardware load balancer that was required to make multiplex switching decisions for performance or security reasons, routing user traffic between several dependent applications on the network.
The applications, and the load balancer that served them, were hardly portable at all. (Yes, you could still turn them off, box them up and roll them onto a truck and install them in another facility, but they’d be offline for days or weeks.)
The rise of virtualization over the last 15 years brought about a software-defined revolution in how we think about infrastructure. Virtually any computing device once housed in a metal case, and the wires that connected it started becoming available as software-defined appliances and networks.
Read the entire article in DZone here.
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