Many consider the router to be the first network appliance. A "software appliance" is the software alone, which must be installed in the computer. Following is a list of common hardware appliances.

Network security vendors sold about $301.6 million in appliances through the channel in the second quarter, down from $309.6 million in the same period a year ago, according to The NPD Group.

A family of network attached storage (NAS) appliances from Network Appliance that are highly scalable to terabytes of data. NetApp Filers are high-performance, mission critical products used by ...