October 9, 2012
IBM Pure jargon
As best I can tell, IBM now has three related families of hardware/software bundles, aka appliances, aka PureSystems, aka something that sounds like “expert system” but in fact has nothing to do with the traditional rules-engine meaning of that term. In particular,
- One of the three families is for the data tier, under the name PureData. That’s what’s new today.
- One of the three families is for the application tier, under the name PureApplication. More information can be found here.
- One of the three families is for “infrastructure”, under the name PureFlex. More information can be found here.
Within the PureData line, there are three sub-families:
- One is based on DB2 pureScale and is said to be “optimized exclusively for transactional data workloads”.
- One is based on Netezza, and is said to be “optimized exclusively for analytic workloads”.
- One is based on DB2 with the shared-nothing option, and is said to be “optimized exclusively for operational analytic data workloads”, notwithstanding that the underlying software has for years been IBM’s flagship general-purpose (non-mainframe) DBMS.
The Netezza part of the story seems to start:
- The Netezza name is being deprecated, except insofar as certain PureData systems are “Powered by Netezza Technology.”
- Netezza didn’t trumpet slipstream hardware enhancements even when it was independent, and IBM sure isn’t reversing that policy now.
- The Netezza software has been enhanced, most notably in a ~20X improvement in concurrency for “tactical” queries.
Perhaps someday I’ll be able to supply interesting details, for example about the concurrency improvement or about the uses (if any) customers are finding for Netezza’s in-database analytics — but as previously noted, analyzing big companies is hard.
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4 Responses to “IBM Pure jargon”
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[…] my standards, I’ve been writing a lot about Oracle and IBM recently. Let me now step back and review the context in which I view […]
So when an ‘operational analytic workload’ running on PureData becomes an ‘analytic workload’, will a DB2 to Netezza migration be required?
Hi Paul,
I see as more likely the opposite migration (NZ->DB2) as long as with ‘operational analytic workload’ is designated a more real-time and very selective (i.e. applied to a single customer at a time) workload than the ‘analytic workload’.
I don’t see many companies moving the other way.
[…] IBM has sold a lot of Netezza into its installed base. Otherwise Netezza seems to be lagging. And it’s generally assumed that most noteworthy Netezza people have been or can be hired away. (Big exceptions: Phil Francisco, perhaps also John Metzger.) Wisely, IBM has made no moves to combine DB2 and Netezza into a single product. […]