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

 

Comments

[Aaron Bartell]

Always good to hear things are becoming more integrated!

I am navigating through the PureSystems link and am trying to determine what is being accomplished with "PureApplication Systems". There aren't any technologies mentioned (i.e. programming languages, application servers, web servers, data bases, development tools, etc).

Where can I get more in-depth info that gets to the nitty gritty for an RPG, PHP or Java shop running on IBM i? Or is that not the point of PureSystems?

Is "PureSystem Flex" a new operating system? That was one thought I had based on browsing the PureSystems Centre: http://ibm.co/HC3sGS

help.

AaronBartell.com

[Nathan M. Andelin]

IBM's Dave Mitchell introduced IBM's PureApplication family yesterday in a webcast to ISVs, and indicated that we could package our applications as appliances and make them available through SmartCloud. That PureSystems would be a public cloud offering through SmartCloud.

Will IBM i be included in SmartCloud so we can do that?

[Jean Mikhaleff]

The requirements of Cloud Computing are:
-) one version of the program for all the users connected.
-) AnyDevice which mean native Web interfaces.
Tuning SAP is great, however I see no change for IBM i developers in this announcement.

[Joe P.]

Can PureSystems take all the responsibly of maintaining all of my web pages and online web applications/queries so I don't have to worry about security, hackers, digital certificates, and all the other headaches when you expose your backend system (AS/400) to the world wide web? This is my biggest problem when trying to cross over into modernization when we have limited resources and developer know-how.

[Karl]

@aaron
I don't think, that the PureSystems are new operating systems. IMHO these systems would be an alternative (replacement?) to the blade centers, provided with a new systems management for a rapid distribution and configuration. This means, application deployment can be embedded in the whole installation process by patterns. But the actual application development will not change. This is my understanding of these new systems, correct me, if I'm wrong.
Karl
logic.ch

[Jean Mikhaleff]

As I understand, PureSystem is mainly an Expert System and not a new OS.
The advantage of an Expert System is the constant quality delivered for standard jobs.
IBM can succeed only with a proprietary computer.
I mean, an Expert System can operate only if the server is predictable.
The goal of an Expert System is to simulate an Expert.
For instance, if you have to reboot a server twice a day, the only one thing an Expert System can do is an articulate finger outside to reboot automatically when a serious problem occurs. So, an Expert System seems to be great if the new clients want to migrate from those servers to PureSystem.
The only one modern and integrated “OS” I see is IBM i, which is natively multi-tenant/multi-users for REAL Cloud Computing business applications… if only.
The only business language IBM has now is RPG.