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IBM takes on Oracle with PureData appliances

'Watch out, Larry, here we come'

Rebadging Netezza warehouses and Smartie boxes

The PureData brand is also being slapped on some existing appliances that IBM has crafted for running analytics workloads, called Smart Analytics Systems or Smarties here at El Reg, as well as on the data warehouse appliances based on IBM blade servers that Big Blue got its hands on when it acquired Netezza back in September 2010.

The rebadged Smartie box is a cluster based on IBM's Power7-based Power 740 servers running AIX and DB2 10, InfoSphere Warehouse 10, and Cognos 8 analytics, while the rebadged Netezza box still uses the TwinFin architecture that marries x86 blade server with blades with special FPGA's designed to compress and decompress data on storage arrays and pre-chew it for database servers running on those x86 blades. (This is similar to what Oracle has done with the Exadata machines.)

You will recognize the PureData System for Operational Analytics A1791 as the Smartie 7700, and the PureData System for Analytics N1001 as the Netezza 1000. PureData A1791 and PureData N1001 are reasonably short names we might remember. "The first is good at doing thousands of queries per second," explains Kopp, "while the latter is good at doing big and complex queries in seconds."

These two rebadged appliances will be available on October 26 as well, including integration with the Flex System Manager and the "expert integration" templating system that is part of the PureApplication systems. And with that funky new rack that the PureData T1500 comes in, too.

IBM did not launch a PureData machine expressly to run its BigInsights variant of the Hadoop data muncher, but obviously it could whip up such a product in pretty short order. ®

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