Hardware Agnostic

What Does Hardware Agnostic Mean?

The term hardware agnostic in IT is applied to the methodology where reliance on hardware or a specific platform resource is not required. Hardware-agnostic systems do not require any modifications to run on a variety of devices. Thus hardware agnostic design brings about a high level of compatibility across most common systems.

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Hardware agnostic is also known as device independent.

Techopedia Explains Hardware Agnostic

Hardware-agnostic systems or device-agnostic components are those that do not require any special hardware adaptations and can work with different types of systems without suffering compatibility issues. The term agnostic can be applied to both hardware and software.

A hardware agnostic solution leverages certain techniques like virtualization in oreder to provide a usable product that can be used seamlessly on all platforms, operating systems and underlying hardware types. For instance, a hardware-agnostic mobile app is able to run on all types of devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets.

There is a high need for hardware agnostic solutions due to the wide variety of hardware devices and expanding IT consumerization. It also finds a great application in cloud computing and storage systems. Some storage systems are moving towards hardware-agnostic information architecture for efficiency.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…