Appliance boxes are big in the IT industry right now; they provide point-solutions to specific problems. My problems with them tend to fall into these catagories:

1. They tend not to have the full feature set of a server-based solution
2. They tend not to scale as well
3. They work wonderfully as long as the creator thought of your particular problem in advance

Infoblox sells appliance boxes that are very unique; LDAP, RADIUS and DNS in appliance form. Before this your choices for DNS were either 1) put it on a UNIX box and hire (or rent) a guru or 2) use a horribly broken and badly designed kludge that works on Windows.

As Infoblox has Cricket Liu on staff (he wrote the O’Reilly books on DNS) I suspect their implementation uses Open Source and is fully featured.

Now, how do I get them to send me a free demo box?