Claiming tighter integration with the management and application layers, the company believes that its compute-storage-network in a box is much ahead of the current offerings in the market. By Harshal Kallyanpur
IBM recently announced its foray into the converged infrastructure space with its PureSystems portfolio. Through this new offering, the company claims that it has not only integrated compute, storage and networking into one box but it has also taken it to the next level through strong integration with the management and application layers.
According to the company, most organizations end up spending months in getting the right hardware, applications and then making the hardware and applications integrate and interface with each other. According to a study conducted by it, two-thirds of corporate IT projects are delivered over budget and behind schedule and only one in five corporate IT departments are able to spend the majority of their IT budget upon innovation.
“Organizations end up either implementing general purpose systems and try to make them as flexible as possible or they take an appliance-based approach. Of late, they have also been looking at Cloud-based application roll outs as an answer to their changing IT requirements,” said Pradeep Nair, Director, Software Group, IBM India/South Asia.
According to Alok Ohrie, Director, Systems & Technology Group, IBM India/South Asia, organizations spent six months or more in just deploying the products that they had procured, which further translated into project delays of 12 to 18 months.
IBM’s PureSystems portfolio is aimed at easing these deployment pains. Integrating server, storage and networking into one system, with virtualization and system management capabilities on-board, the technology offering is based on a scale-in design that, IBM claims, offers a higher degree of flexibility, stronger application integration and greater computing power.
The technology offering also employs what IBM calls Patterns of Expertise, software-based, predefined best-practice configurations for the applications that are typically deployed in an enterprise environment. The company claims that with Patterns of Expertise, an organization can setup, configure, deploy applications and get them to integrate with the hardware and other applications within a few minutes, thereby bringing down deployment time from days or months to just a few hours.
The third component of the offering is PureApplications, which is a set of applications that have been optimized to integrate with Web and database applications. They are aimed at reducing the deployment, configuration, integration and tuning time for applications.
According to Ohrie, over 100 ISVs have partnered with IBM to optimize applications for the PureFlex environment. The launch presentation for the solution also saw the company claiming up to 300% increased performance for critical applications.
Helene Armitage, General Manager, Systems Software and Growth Solutions, IBM Systems & Technology Group, was of the view that an MSP with 30 Unix servers, 22 storage systems and 200 x86-based servers consolidated on a single PureFlex system could see up to 71% or $2.6 million worth of savings on system OPEX and up to 53% or $2 million worth of savings on management costs.
Taking the conversation further from an application perspective, Barbara Cain, President, Business Analytics Product Management and Growth Initiatives, IBM Business Analytics Software Group, said that the PureSystems offered up to 30 times faster application deployment, 53% reduction in management time and 53% reduction in change management.
The systems support both IBM Power and x86 based processors and Windows, Linux and Unix environments.
The new solution puts IBM directly in competition with vendors such as Cisco, HP and Oracle that had launched offerings in this space. When quizzed about it, Armitage was of the view that Cisco and HP had made considerable advances in this sphere, with HP leading the curve in addressing system management issues. IBM has not only learnt from the competition but built the system based on its decades of experience in the data center space.
The PureSystems offering is available in three flavors—Express, Standard and Enterprise with the Express version starting at $100,000 and the company is employing its traditional sales channels to go-to-market with the new offering.
IBM has already signed up one customer in the mid-size segment and is at a POC level with several others.
