IBM is rolling out a host of preconfigured systems that offer the tech giant s analytics software on mainframe and Power-based servers.
The new Smart Analytics System servers are among a wide-ranging release of products–including storage offerings–that are aimed at helping businesses make better use of the massive amounts of data they re collecting, according to IBM officials. The company has a vision of how knowledge and data can be shared better on a global basis, but it also believes that can’t happen with traditional IT approaches without risking greater sprawl and slower customer responsiveness, according to an IBM spokesperson.
The new offerings –more than 55 new and upgraded server and storage technologies, in all–are aimed at addressing those issues, the spokesperson said.
The new analytics systems come at a time when top-tier OEMs are looking at ways of integrating workload-specific software onto servers, giving enterprises powerful and easy-to-deploy offerings. Oracle officials have been vocal proponents of this approach, bundling their software onto SPARC and x86 systems from the hardware business they inherited when the software giant bought Sun Microsystems last year.
Oracle over the past two years has introduced its Exadata Database Machine, a preconfigured data warehousing system the combines Oracle’s software with Sun server and storage technology, and the Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud, a cloud-in-a-box solution that includes Oracle’s virtual machine software and other applications in hardware that runs on either x86 or SPARC chips.
Most recently, Oracle earlier this month unveiled its Exalytics system, which when it rolls out next year will include the company’s parallelized TimesTen relational online transaction processing (OLTP) and Essbase parallel online analytical processing databases running on a Sun Fire system powered by Intel Xeon E7 chips.
Analytics has been a focal point at IBM over the past several years as the company has pushed its Smarter Planet initiative, which calls for enabling organizations to more quickly and easily analyze the huge amounts of data they re generating and to leverage it for better business results. The Smarter Planet push appears to be gaining traction: In the third quarter, Smarter Planet revenue for IBM grew 50 percent over the same period last year, according to the company. The Smart Analytic Systems fall in line with that strategy.
IBM s Smart Analytics System 9700 and 9710 are zEnterprise mainframe systems that run either Red Hat or SUSE Linux and offer mainframe-based data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) software. They also come at an entry-level price, according to IBM, though the vendor was not specific on the pricing.
To read the original eWeek article, click here: IBM Intros New Servers, Storage for Analytics, Cloud, Virtualization
