Cloud computing represents an opportunity for enterprise and service provider datacenters to become more agile and flexible by using self-service infrastructure provisioning; automated, dynamic resource pooling and scaling; and consumption-based metering to improve accelerate cloud infrastructure configuration, provisioning, and life-cycle management. Integrated systems, such as the IBM PureFlex System, pre-integrate and optimize software stacks with compute, storage, network, and management software resources to enable optimal performance of mission-critical applications and workloads. Many IT organizations are using integrated systems as core platforms to enable private clouds and public cloud service delivery environments. IDC interviews show that organizations using IBM PureFlex System as the infrastructure platform for cloud realized over $640,000 in benefits related to improved infrastructure deployment, performance, and operational economics.

To keep up with the demands of mobile usage and social business you have to manage huge amounts of data. This means you need your IT to support rapid development of new applications, particularly mobile and social apps, to keep pace with the competition. You need to be able to analyze big data to uncover new insights, business models and revenue opportunities. You have to be able to act quickly so you can respond while findings are still relevant. Cloud computing is the delivery model that can support these imperatives. Over 10,000 clients rely on IBM technology to optimize their social, mobile, and big data workloads on cloud infrastructure. PureSystems solutions build on this cloud experience, integrating it into the system to improve efficiency and simplify deployment.

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.