IBM's PureSystems Strides Past the One-Year Milestone

IBM's PureSystems celebrates its first birthday April 11. A year ago, IBM officials announced what they said was a major step forward in a simpler era of computing, introducing a new category of "expert integrated systems." Observers and IBM insiders said the PureSystems represented as big a move for the company as when it introduced the mainframe 50 years ago. Ambuj Goyal, general manager of development in IBM's Systems and Technology Group, told eWEEK the new family of systems is the first with built-in expertise based on IBM's decades of experience running IT operations for tens of thousands of clients in 170 countries. The PureSystems were the result of $2 billion in R&D and acquisitions over four years, an unprecedented move by IBM to integrate all IT elements, both physical and virtual. The acquisitions included Platform Computing and Blade Network Technologies. "From an IBM perspective, in my lifetime, I have not seen so much of IBM all behind one thing with software, hardware and services; it's like 50 years ago when we announced the mainframe," Goyal said. "In many ways, it is as big as that, but designed for a different world." That was April 2012. Now the PureSystems are out in the wild working hard for IBM clients. Here, eWEEK takes a look at how the systems are being used.