Some Sizzle But Not Enough Steak: IT Jungle article on PureSystems Reminds Me How Much More We Need to Learn About the Systems

In a fairly detailed article (though he is promising more feeds and speeds information later), Tim Prickett Morgan breaks down the new PureFlex raw infrastructure boxes and the PureApplication application server boxes that IBM announced today.

Although Tim bills this as a high-level overview article, it contains some really good detail as to what exactly is in these boxes; details that IBM didn’t get around to in the announcement.

Looking at Tim’s chart on the costs and specs of the Express, Standard, and Enterprise boxes and their prices, for example, I’m shocked that IBM didn’t show us this information in their “fake news” announcement format today (and when I say “fake news”, I don’t mean that in a fun Stephen Colbert/John Stewart sort of way). In fact, IBM didn’t even mention that there were Express, Standard, and Enterprise versions of these boxes and their prices (although they did mention that the machines start at $100k). After the excitement of the announcement and the very good Morton’s filet mignon lunch (thanks, IBM), I find it rather odd in retrospect that IBM missed this very basic server point.

Another odd fact that hit me was that after the presentation, I had to ask IBM what the difference was between the PureFlex and PureApplication servers, as I wasn’t sure they had covered that in the announcement.

While the announcement wasn’t all sizzle and no steak by a long shot, Tim’s article reminded me that I really didn’t see as much steak as I might have liked in today’s announcement. There still is a lot more to learn about these boxes beyond IBM’s vision of reducing management and programming time to deploy. And over the coming weeks and months, I’m looking forward to IBM digging below the surface and giving us more details on why we need to consider these things for our data centers. Luckily, IT Jungle has grabbed a shovel and started to dig already.

So if you get a chance, make sure to go through Tim’s article. It’s a good read on starting to really understand these machines.

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