Marketplace Update November 2012 IBM PureFlex System: The Next Smart Step in Enterprise IT Evo- lution By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. Pund-IT, Inc. Contact: Hayward, CA Office: 510-383-6767 U.S.A. 94541 Mobile: 510-909-0750
[email protected] www.pund-it.com IBM PureFlex System: The Next Smart Step in Enterprise IT Evolution By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. Introduction For decades, corporate IT has been driven by two parallel, though not always complemen- tary, evolutionary trends: 1) the appearance of essentially new computing technologies and form factors, and 2) the steady expansion of business processes and use cases to which IT is applied. The chain of events that led to the appearance of mainframe, then scale-up Unix, then scale-out x86 systems offers one example of this transformation. So does the arrival of solutions which presage customer requirements, such as the development of highly flexible, integrated and compact blade server systems. More recently, these same trends have been manifested in two new classes of IT prod- ucts—cloud computing infrastructures and workload- or application-optimized systems and appliances. The former tend to leverage highly virtualized commodity server, storage and networking components and streamlined management tools. That makes them ideal for the easy deployment and quick integration that are so valuable in cloud data centers where rapid growth and flexible resource allocation play key roles. The latter cases often incorporate many of the same commodity hardware components, along with finely tuned middleware and application stacks which are factory- or client- integrated for particular workloads.