PureSystems Offers the Next Generation of Ecosystem Flexibility
The IBM PureSystems platform offers more than just a data center in a single rack. These expert integrated systems are preconfigured, tuned and ready to roll—tailored for the customer's environment. Each is an ecosystem in itself: optimized in the factory with all the hardware and software components built to work together. The PureSystems offering seems well suited for a world where IT budgets are under pressure, and IT teams need to get more from less.
Now, instead of requiring a team of people to build the infrastructure for your application, you can order a factory-built system optimized for your particular application. That's a smart response to a world where most businesses don't have the luxury of separate teams for configuring storage, building and tuning the OS, configuring the network, or dedicated database administration. Even if you're large enough to have those teams on standby, there’s a huge cost in managing them all, getting them to work together, and building the systems within a reasonable time.
Simplified Administration
With IBM PureSystems technology, you can deploy a solution for your business-critical systems much faster. We're talking hours (or even minutes) instead of weeks or maybe months. It offers an optimal configuration for disk layout, performance tuning, software, firmware, and all able to be managed via a single pane of glass.
The simplified infrastructure management is a big bonus. After all, even if you have your system well configured and tuned, how do you monitor it? How many interfaces do you need to keep an eye on the power and cooling, the disks, file systems, and OS updates? With the PureSystems platform you can drill down to a single hardware component or check the state of an application. And you don't need a college degree or a decade of experience to work out how to manage it all.
It's not just the rapid deployment and ease of day-to-day management that make PureSystems offering so attractive. There's also the simplicity of upgrades—a hidden cost for organizations that spend countless workdays just preparing for new versions of software.
The PureSystems philosophy takes a fresh approach to the perennial problem of managing software and hardware dependencies. You know the challenges: an application is going out of support, or needs to be upgraded to take advantage of some new features. However, the upgrade is dependent upon an OS release, which in turn needs system firmware to be up to date. Often enough the driver for upgrades is simply to get access to more storage, so add that to your shopping list of prerequisites.
With PureSystems technology, upgrades for all system components are available through a single fix pack. And they're all pre-integrated, so that when you need an upgrade, you know you've got all the prerequisites, tested and ready to go.
Time for Thinking
If your IT team still has the luxury of dedicated sys admins, chances are they don’t have the time to learn the underlying hows and whys of your infrastructure. They just want to get it working. We live in a high-speed, high-tech world, where simplicity is king, and every project has a deadline of yesterday.
Much as I love configuring, monitoring and managing systems, I have to admit that not everyone shares my passion. They want the executive summary, and they politely ask me to turn off the verbose flag. “Just tell me when it’s ready” is often all the encouragement I get.
I can understand where they're coming from. After all, need to know usually trumps like to know. Everyone’s busy, so why should they have to learn what a processor core is, or how to monitor a file system that's running short of space? Why would they care what the queue depth should be set to, or how to build a Shared Ethernet Adapter?
Working Outside the Box
The modularity and scalability of the PureSystems platform are a good response to a pressing market need.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and PureSystems ecosystems are built with the flexibility to be around for a good 10 years. They are built for growth, and they work well either as a standalone private cloud solution, or as a valuable system that can connect to existing infrastructure.