Like Royalty, IBM have turned up late to what is arguably their own party with their PureSystems launch today. IBM, the company which invented converged systems in the form of the mainframe, have finally got round to launching their own infrastructure stack product. But have they turned up too late and is everyone already tucking into the buffet and ignoring the late-comer?
For all the bluster and talk about the ability to have Power and x86 in the same frame and dare I whisper mainframe; this is really an answer to the vBlock, FlexPod and Matrix et all. IBM can wrap it and clothe it but this is a stack and if pushed they will admit this.
But when I first had the pitch a few months ago; I must admit, despite the ‘so what’ reaction, I was impressed with what appears to be a lot of thought and detail from an infrastructure engineering point of view. It looks pretty good as slide-ware.
Still the question is…is it any better than the competitors; well even if you treat it as a pure x86 infrastructure ‘stack in a rack’, it certainly appears to be more flexible than some of the competitors. You have choices as to what hypervisor it’ll support for starters. It appears to be more polished and less bodged together from a hardware point of view.
But at the end of the day, it is what it is and what is going to be really important is whether it can really deliver the management efficiencies and improve IT’s effectiveness. And that, as is with all it’s competitors is still a question where there is not yet a solid answer.
As a product, it looks at least as good as the rest…as an answer? The workings are still being worked upon.