This paper shows how the new IBM systems with X6 technology were designed to take clients to a new frontier of x86 computing. These new X6 systems are ideal platforms for meeting business-critical demands with data base, business analytics, virtualization and ERP applications.

The paper discusses the rise of Big Data and the importance of analytics for rapidly extracting insights from this data for improved business decisions. It outlines key market requirements for Big Data servers, and explains how the new System x3650 M4 BD includes the right performance, storage capacity, availability, and energy efficiency to meet the demands of Big Data analytics. It concludes by describing additional benefits that IBM brings to the Big Data market, such as the Big Data Systems Center with its panel of SMEs and offered services, and IBM InfoSphere Big Insights software.

IBM PureApplication System: An expert integrated platform system Consolidate workloads, simplify infrastructure and deliver services rapidly using built-in expertise. The IBM PureApplication System is a platform system designed and tuned specifically for transactional web and database applications. This workload aware, flexible platform is designed to be easy to deploy, customize, safeguard and manage. Whether you operate in a traditional or private cloud environment, this IBM solution can provide you with superior IT economics. With the PureApplication System, you can provision your own patterns of software, middleware and virtual system resources. You can provision these patterns within an innovative framework that is shaped by IT best practices and industry standards - standards that have been culled from many years of IBM experience with clients and from a deep understanding of smarter computing. These IT best practices and standards are infused throughout the system.

A social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value. Social businesses connect individuals, so they can rapidly share information, knowledge and ideas by having conversations and publishing informal content. They analyze social content from multiple channels and sources, in addition to structured data, to gain insights from both external and internal stakeholders. When those things happen, innovation and business execution rates increase, better decisions are made, and customers and employees are more engaged and satisfied. Social businesses enjoy lower operating costs, faster speed-to-market, improved customer and employee engagement, and increased profitability. Many organizations don't fully appreciate the magnitude of the value creation potential of social business.

People, machines, data, processes are more connected than ever before, in more ways, and at a pace not previously envisioned. Because of this, the means of user interaction are evolving rapidly, and the outcome is an explosion of information increasing at epic rates. Both the opportunity and the challenge for an organization is to execute a strategy to most effectively participate in, exploit and derive ongoing value from the expansive digital world. To evaluate and ultimately better facilitate this, many organizations are specifically defining a digital strategy as part of their overall general business strategy. Central to that digital strategy is the digital experience.

Big data promises valuable insights that are enticing organizations to invest in analytics and BI tools. Yet many overlook the need for a DBMS that can stand up to the strain big data places on the underlying infrastructure. This ePaper explores the DBMS characteristics of most importance in a big data setting.

High reliability and system availability are absolutely crucial for database and the underlying server hardware. A 67% majority of organizations now require that their databases deliver a minimum of four, five or six "nines" of uptime for their most mission critical applications. That is the equivalent of 52 seconds to 52 minutes of unplanned downtime per database/per annum. Those are the results of ITIC's 2013 - 2014 Database Reliability and Deployment Trends Survey, an independent Web-based survey which polled 600 organizations worldwide from August through October 2013. IBM DB2 and Informix databases, followed closely by Microsoft SQL Server, achieved the highest overall reliability and customer satisfaction ratings for product performance, security, technical service and support and the value of its pricing and licensing agreements. Oracle DB scored high for reliability and performance but lagged far behind IBM and Microsoft in customer satisfaction with pricing, licensing and technical support.

In this Advisory, Clabby Analytics looks more closely at the importance of implementing an integrated infrastructure - and its relationship to business analytics. The paper will examine the business analytics workloads, discuss how these workloads put different demands on the underlying systems and infrastructure, and provide guidance designing an integrated business analytics environment that will provide organizations with high performance, resiliency, and a scalable growth path.