IBM Expands PureSystems Family With New PureData Big Data Box

IBM introduced its new PureData System, a new member of its family of expert integrated PureSystems that is powered with analytics and other technology for wrangling big data.

IBM has expanded its family of expert integrated PureSystems with the new PureData System, which features analytics and the ability to handle big data in the box.

To help global organizations make sense of the massive influx of data being created daily, IBM expanded its PureSystems family. Now users can more efficiently manage and quickly analyze petabytes of data in minutes and intelligently use those insights to support specific business goals such as marketing, sales and business operations, IBM said.

The PureData System is available in three workload-specific models optimized for transactional, operational and big data analytics to help clients solve these challenges.

IBM officials said the PureData System is the next step forward in the company’s overall strategy to deliver a family of systems with built-in expertise that leverages its decades of experience to reduce the cost and complexity associated with information technology. According to IBM, users can have the system up and running in 24 hours and handle more than 100 databases on a single system.

IBM estimates that 2.5 exabytes of data are created every day—so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Given this data deluge, clients can use the new PureData System for high-performance data services for traditional or cloud environments. The new system builds on the initial PureSystems family of offerings that can deploy Web applications in less than 10 days, a task that once took at least six months. The PureSystems family is the result of $2 billion in R&D and acquisitions over four years. IBM introduced its PureSystems family in April 2012. This Oct. 9 announcement expands on the introduction of IBM PureSystems, which includes PureApplication and PureFlex Systems

“We are on the leading edge of a new era of computing where clients can process vast amounts of information in real time and in ways that can fundamentally transform how business gets done,” said Arvind Krishna, general manager of IBM Information Management, in a statement. “To accelerate this transformation, we need to simplify and speed the deployment of new capabilities—and greatly reduce the cost of IT operations. Today’s introduction of the PureData System is an important step in our journey as we help clients achieve new levels of speed, simplicity and savings.” 

IBM introduced three workload-specific models of the PureData System:

• PureData System for Transactions: Retail and credit card processing environments depend on the rapid handling of transactions and interactions. These transactions may be small, but the volume and frequency require fast and efficient environments. The new system provides hardware and software configurations integrated and optimized for flexibility, integrity, availability and scalability for any transaction workload.

• PureData System for Analytics: For today’s organizations to be competitive, they need to quickly and easily analyze and explore big data—even when dealing with petabytes. The new system simplifies and optimizes the performance of data warehouse services and analytics applications. Powered by Netezza technology, the new PureData for Analytics system is designed to accelerate analytics and boasts the largest library of in-database analytic functions on the market today. Clients can use it to predict and help avoid customer churn in seconds, and create targeted advertising and promotions using predictive and spatial analysis, and prevent fraud.

• PureData System for Operational Analytics: The new system can deliver actionable insights concurrently to more than 1,000 business operations to support real-time decision making. Operational warehouse systems are used for fraud detection during credit card processing, to deliver customer insights to call center operations, and track and predict real-time changes in supply and demand for energy and utilities.

IBM said the Premier health care alliance has selected a PureData System to manage and analyze its massive clinical, financial and outcomes database with information on one in every four patient discharges, 2.5 million real-time clinical transactions a day and $43 billion in annual purchasing data.

“One of our biggest challenges has been the ability to quickly acquire and analyze big data, then place the insights from that data directly into the hands of caregivers,” Todd Wilkes, vice president of enterprise solution development at Premier, a provider-owned alliance helping 2,700 hospitals and 90,000 other health providers improve their patient care and finances, said in a statement. “With IBM big data analytics, we can now analyze any data with sub-second response times and share insights from it to help our alliance members improve patient care, reduce costs and better understand what’s going on within their hospitals and health systems.”

As IBM expands its family of expert integrated systems, the IBM Business Partner ecosystem embracing PureSystems also continues to grow. Numerous partners such as DynaFront Systems and PCCW Solutions are installing PureSystems in their own data centers to deliver value to clients. Additionally, more than 60 independent software vendors (ISVs) have already committed to support PureData System.

To date, IBM partners have delivered more than 200 solutions and applications that are optimized to run on IBM’s expert integrated systems. Building on these offerings, IBM is also introducing several new patterns designed to radically streamline the set-up and management of hardware and software resources. This includes patterns for social business, asset management and business process management. These patterns and solutions, which span 20 industries, can be accessed through the IBM PureSystems Centre.

The new systems family offers users an alternative to current enterprise computing models, where multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain. The PureFlex System enables organizations to more efficiently create and manage an infrastructure, while the PureApplication System helps organizations reduce the cost and complexity of rapidly deploying and managing applications. In addition to the common Web application patterns supported by the PureApplication System, the combination of both PureData and PureApplication Systems can now be used for end-to-end transaction workloads, IBM said.

The PureData System will start shipping to customers at the end of October, IBM said.