Chris Pratt, strategic initiatives executive, IBM Canada
IBM’s launch of PureSystems this month encapsulates one of the paradoxes of IT today: as technology becomes more sophisticated, ubiquitous and applied to an increasingly complex set of real world challenges, the demand for simple solutions grows. This truism is especially evident in two of the transformational trends that are now shaking the foundations of the traditional technology world – cloud and the consumerization of IT, which each in their own way, are contributing to establishment of new consumptions model where daily IT operation no longer relies on the local application of highly specialized IT knowledge and skill that in turn are better directed at business issues. So how does PureSystems reflect and support this growing trend towards the development of ever more powerful compute capability that can be consumed with increasing ease?
According to Chris Pratt, strategic initiatives executive for IBM Canada, traditional IT is no longer capable of providing the compute intensive support needed to address the global challenges of today : “the
amazing workloads like Data Baby are not possible on traditional computing. It would be unaffordable to use systems that have 15% utilization and 95% availability.” To attack new kinds of requirements, enterprises have adopted three different tactics that Pratt feels have both strength and limitations, including: use of “client-tuned systems” that are probably the best approach, but are inherently inflexible; use of appliances that are quick to deploy and work well but are essentially “single purpose” niche applications; and migration to cloud, with the somewhat “unrealistic expectation” that they can wait for cloud to solve all problems.
