PureSystems, Mobility, Friends and Disney

You could pick much worse places to be than Anaheim, California this week.

The COMMON Annual Conference is taking place at the Disneyland Resort. As one would expect from Disney, the location is clean, the employees are friendly and helpful, and the food is very tasty.

But that’s not the reason we’re here, right? OK, right, but it makes a week of technical meetings and presentations that much easier to power through. And that’s what we’ve been doing.

One of the highlights of the conference from my point of view is getting to present new material to the IBM i customer set. I’ve already participated in the IBM i Q&A, and shortly will be giving my “Why IBM i?” presentation for the first of two times this week. Tomorrow, I get to participate in an RPG Open Access session describing the Open Standard for DDS which has been driven by the community. I also have the chance to try out a newly written presentation about IBM i Technology Refreshes, and I will sit down for a chat with the Young i Professionals. Finally, Wednesday I have my biggest day of presenting at the conference, with a repeat of “Why i?” along with “IBM i – Today, Tomorrow & Beyond” which has been extensively reworked this year, and the “IBM i Latest & Greatest” talk which wraps up the conference.

Two of the three technical topics I’ve been discussing most are PureSystems and Live Partition Mobility (LPM) – the topics of my two most recent blogs. I haven’t taken a photo of LPM (though it is being demo-ed) but I do have a couple of pictures of a PureApplication system, which is down in the Expo area.

Here’s the back, with a look at all the pre-cabled components.

And here is a nice photo of the front of the machine.

That’s Patty Clancy with me by the machine. She has been very involved in making all of the magic happen to get the PureFlex server ready for delivery.

The third topic that is coming up most in my discussions is Technology Refreshes. I am happy that I had the opportunity to discuss it with the COMMON Americas Advisory Council before the conference started, so I could make my presentation on TRs better than it would have been. And every time I get asked about TRs, I go back to the charts to make sure I have addressed the question when I give the presentation.

After so many years of participating in this conference, you might think I would know everyone who is here, but I keep meeting new people. The conference is big, and new people come each year. Yes, I have many friends at COMMON now, but I am meeting more people every day. It’s one of the rewarding aspects of face-to-face meetings like this. I am happy to be able to give webcasts, and to write blogs and tweet, but there is something special about developing a relationship with a person over a meal, around an Expo booth, or walking in the warm California sunshine that cannot be replicated online.

I had better stop writing now and prepare for my next session. Whether you are here with me, or reading this from somewhere else in the world, I hope you have a chance to learn something new about IBM i today. And I hope you also have a chance to spend some time with friends. Both pursuits are well worth your time.

 

Twitter: #ibmi, #commonug #PureSystems @Steve_Will_IBMi

 

IBM PureSystems and IBM i

Today IBM is announcing IBM PureSystems, and as announcements go, it is a major announcement. It touches all aspects of what IBM offers customers, and all parts of IBM’s business have been involved in creating it, and will continue to be involved in delivering it. In today’s “You and i” I want to give you a very brief overview of IBM PureSystems, from the “i” perspective.

As I mentioned recently, and Alison wrote about last time, the strategic Smarter Planet initiative in IBM has been a driving force behind how we explain IBM technology value for the world today, and in the near future. But Smarter Planet is more than a marketing message – it also provides the framework for designing and creating answers to the questions we know our customers are facing, or will face soon. A key set of technology forming IBM’s answer to those questions has been previewed for the past several months - Expert Integrated Systems. IBM PureSystems is the family of Expert Integrated Systems.

You can find out much more than I have space to describe by visiting the IBM PureSystems website – ibm.com/puresystems – but I thought long-time “i” clients would be interested in a few key aspects on announce day.

Let’s get the biggest question out of the way first: Yes, PureSystems supports IBM i – or IBM i supports PureSystems – however you look at it. You can run IBM i solutions in either of the two PureSystems configurations: a PureFlex system, which is intended to be an infrastructure system in an IT organization, or a PureApplication system, which incorporates ISV solutions into the platform. Now that we know that, let’s get on to other interesting aspects of IBM PureSystems.

You can see the three cornerstone values of PureSystems in the picture above, and those values should sound very, very familiar to the IBM i users among us:

• Integration by Design – Deeply integrating and tuning hardware and software
• Simplified Experience – Reducing the complexity and shortening the amount of time it takes to get value out of your IT
• Built-In Experience – Using the expertise IBM has built up over the years to capture and automate what experts do when deploying a complete IT solution

Those values, of course, are historically the same values IBM i has carried forward from our heritage.

• Integration by Design – The “i” in IBM i stands for integration, after all.
• Simplified Experience –The simplicity of managing our platform has always been a hallmark of IBM i, and it helps drive the world-class Total Cost of Ownership value appreciated by our clients.
• Built-In Experience – From DB2 for i, which automates much of its own “care and feeding,” to using intuitive and automatic means to provide security to protect your data and your system, IBM i has built in experience from our developers and our partners over the years.

With PureSystems, these values are applied to a much larger, more comprehensive portion of the IBM portfolio. As IT shops grow, and become more integral in providing strategic value to their companies, they need their x86-based workloads to work better with their Power technology-based workloads. They need all of those workloads to use virtualization effectively to provide availability and reliability, while using their storage and networking in a optimal ways. PureSystems are designed to address those needs.

Applying traditional IBM i values to enterprise IT requirements as a whole involves every part of IBM, as I mentioned above. In some ways, it’s an evolution of what existed before, but in other ways, it’s quite a change. Take a few minutes and take a look at what has begun today as we take this next big step in the journey into a Smarter Planet.

 

 

 

Twitter: #ibmi, #expertintsystems,#IBMPureSystems @Steve_Will_IBMi