IBM Offers PureData To Help Enterprises Tame Big Data

IBM has expanded its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems with the introduction of PureData System. These systems compete with Oracle's Exadata and SAP's HANA in the high performance computing (HPC) appliance market.

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 says the PureData System allows clients to run analytics in minutes, not hours, by handling more than 100 databases on a single system. PureData System is geared for high performance data services for traditional or cloud environments. It 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.

“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, IBM Information Management. "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.”

Transactions and Analytics

The PureData System for transactions model includes hardware and software configurations integrated and optimized for retail and credit card processing environments. The PureData System for Analytics model is powered by Netezza technology and is a system designed to accelerate analytics. IBM acquired Netezza approximately two years ago.  It boasts a large library of in-database analytic functions and can help predict and help avoid customer churn in seconds, create targeted advertising and promotions using predictive and spatial analysis, and prevent fraud. The PureData System for Operational Analytics model can deliver actionable insights concurrently to more than 1,000 business operations to support real-time decision making.

“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,” said 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. “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.”

The announcement of new PureData Systems builds on IBM's set of global initiatives launched last month.  The initiatives outlined an effort aimed at further expanding IBM's cloud ecosystem, enabling organizations to develop solutions and services on IBM SmartCloud and PureSystems, built on open standards.