Most customers were excited when IBM announced IBM PureApplication System, which provided an integrated and real elastic system with built-in expertise to allow customers to run their applications. After engagements with dozens of customers in China, I have been asked many questions about PureApplication. I’d like to share the five most popular questions and my answers.
1. Am I a target customer for using PureApplication System?
PureApplication System is for any customer whose intent is to quickly build a cloud computing platform. It’s especially good for customers who already have mature applications running on IBM middleware and database. It can bring customers unprecedented experience and the ability to rapidly deploy applications.
PureApplication System will directly address customers’ needs in the following four areas:
- Consolidate: If you are looking for an effective way to consolidate IT infrastructure, software platform and applications to reduce the IT maintenance cost, PureApplication is your choice. PureApplication provides a unified interface to allow you to manage Servers, Storage, Networks and Applications in a single view, so that you can reduce your IT management and maintenance cost.
- Optimize: If you are looking for a better way to automatically optimize your IT systems and business applications to increase applications’ performance, flexibility and reliability, PureApplication is your choice. PureApplication supports different kinds of application and business requirements with an out-of-box high performance environment.
- Innovate: If you are looking for a faster way to deploy your applications and services to meet the dynamic business requirements, PureApplication can easily deploy the new applications through the predefined application patterns. These patterns are preconfigured and optimized by experts, and thus can reduce the risk of new applications deployment, and speed up the deployment itself.
- Accelerate: If you plan to build a cloud computing platform with fewer laborers to help quickly deploy new services and solutions, PureApplication is the solution you can immediately adopt to realize an integrated cloud computing system with agility, efficiency, simplicity and control. It can reduce the delivery time from more than ten days to a few hours.
2. Does PureApplication System only support IBM Software?
PureApplication System is an open platform. It is recommended to adopt IBM middleware and database patterns to do automatic deployment. This is more effective than building the middleware platform by yourself. However, you can run middleware and database software from other vendors in PureApplication System as well. You can install and configure software directly on the allocated virtual machines, or you may build other vendors’ software system images to improve the provisioning process.
3. Can I run Windows applications on PureApplication System?
The preinstalled operation system for virtual machines on X86 platform is Linux. Currently IBM does not officially support Windows, which means Windows applications cannot be managed by PureApplication directly. However, PureApplication System supports VMware, and you may install Windows, and run Windows applications on VMware virtual machines.
4. I am using Oracle database. How does PureApplication support Oracle DB?
PureApplication System already contains DB2 database and patterns. The version of DB2 is Oracle compatible. So it is recommended to adopt DB2 database pattern to do automatic deployment and management. However, you can still install Oracle on the virtual machine, but it won’t be managed by PureApplication System. An alternative way is that you use Oracle DB outside PureApplication System as a separate DB system, and allow applications in PureApplication to access Oracle DB outside.
5. After I put all my applications into PureApplication System, how can I make sure it’s a highly available system?
All hardwares in PureApplication System including Network Switches, Storage Controllers, Computer Notes, PureApplication System Management Nodes and VM Management Nodes are designed in redundancy to support high availability and stability. Any single hardware failure won’t affect the system running. For the applications and databases deployed in PureApplication System, PureApplication offers a variety of ways to make sure the system is available and stable, such as virtual application automatic transfer in fault, database backup and DB2 HADR.
