In the 1990s, enterprises discovered that storage was best treated as infrastructure, and network attached storage went from being a radical idea to a mainstream solution in the course of only a few years. Today, network attached processing—consolidating middle-tier server sprawl into a small pool of compute appliances—is poised to deliver similar management and consolidation benefits to J2EE deployments, which can reduce the cost and complexity associated with developing, deploying, managing, and provisioning distributed J2EE applications.