As part of an ongoing push to better equip organisations with the tools to deal with big data, IBM today unveiled a new system for data analysis - the PureData System.
PureData is an expansion of the PureSystems family of integrated systems and was unveiled at the IBM Interconnect conference, in Singapore, on Tuesday.
According to IBM, 2.5 exabytes of data is created every day, and 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years. "Given this data deluge, clients can use the new PureData System for high-performance data services for traditional or cloud environments.
"Organisations across all industries are challenged to find simpler and more cost-effective ways to analyse data and better understand consumer purchases, manage customer churn, perform data-intensive marketing campaigns and detect fraud in real-time," says IBM.
IBM's senior VP for middleware and software, Robert LeBlanc, says: "At IBM, we don't believe in the 'one box does it all' approach. Every workload has a very different set of characteristics." As a result, the three different workload-specific models available are the PureData System for Transactions, Analytics and Operational Analytics respectively.
"PureData is our next generation of systems, which is more integrated than anything we've had in the past. This is not about taking software, packaging it in a bundle and throwing it on hardware. It's about exploiting next-generation capabilities to solve the problems we see are pervasive in the data world."
New era
PureData System for Transactions is tailored for e-commerce applications and the retail and credit card processing environments especially. According to IBM, it can handle billions of real-time transactions requiring lots of reads and writes to systems.
IBM's executive of big data strategy for growth markets, Tim Young, says PureData System is all about delivering expertly integrated systems with the expertise for their management built-in.
"The system is fully integrated and the hardware configuration is designed to solve a specific problem. This allows for the deployment of the right system for the right job."
PureData System for Analytics is powered by Netezza technology and is said to have the largest library of in-database functions on the market. It is suited to applications such as customer analysis, and simplifies and optimises performance of data warehouse services and analytics applications.
"Clients can use it to predict customer churn in seconds, create targeted advertising and promotions, and prevent fraud using spatial analysis," says IBM, adding that it is capable of integrating petabytes of data and can run multiple analytics and reports with minimal administration.
According to Young, PureData System for Analytics allows organisations to retrieve data 10 to 100 times faster. "Complex statistical analytics models can be applied and executed against data where it actually lives," says Young.
The third model of PureData System is PureData System for Operational Analytics that can deliver actionable insights for more than 1 000 business operations simultaneously, to support real-time decision-making.
"The killer app for this would be credit card fraud," says Young, explaining that the system can pull information on the customer and their spending patterns in real-time to conduct fraud analysis immediately and trigger appropriate action. "This is about making the premise of decision-making as accurate as it can be."
"Operational warehouse systems are used for fraud detection during credit card processing, to deliver customer insights to call centre operations, and track and predict real-time changes in supply and demand for energy and utilities," says IBM.
IBM information management GM Arvind Krishna says: "We are on the leading edge of a new era of computing where clients can process vast amounts of information in real-time and in ways that can fundamentally transform how business gets done.
"To accelerate this transformation, we need to simplify and speed the deployment of new capabilities - and greatly reduce the cost of IT operations."
Pure solutions
The introduction of PureData Systems follows the launch of IBM PureSystems in April 2012, and is the result of $2 billion in research and development and acquisitions over the past four years.
Other PureSystem products already available include PureFlex and PureApplications. While PureApplications is designed for database and Web transactions, PureFlex combines computing, data storage management and networking components in a single integrated product.
IBM says the PureData System is easy to deploy and can be implemented in less than 10 days, as opposed to the six months that used to be required for similar system installations. PureData Systems will begin shipping to customers at the end of October.
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