Three PureApplication Announcements you should know
Good Things Come In Threes
There were three main announcements:
- PureApplication Software
- Chef Support
- Docker Support
I’m going to cover these in the order of importance from my perspective (and I hope yours!). Let’s go through them….
PureApplication Software
There’s been rumours for a while but this is the biggie for us and I suspect many of you too.
Originally PureApplication was available as the converged infrastructure rack (the big box!) which was based on PureFlex. With this IBM were saying that you didn’t need to worry about anything but your application – IBM would sell you the hardware, the network and the storage from scratch.
Later on they made this same stack of software available on the cloud (which I wrote abouthere). This made an on and off-premise story available.
The glue in this puzzle is the patterns – which can run on either of the two systems with little to no alterations. However, a key problem with this scenario is that lots of customers have already strategically committed to and invested in non-IBM hardware. They were not about to put IBM converged infrastructure into their data centre without serious push-back. IBM recognised this and with PureApplication Software has now enabled you to have all of that goodness of the patterns and virtualisation capability but bring your own (BYO) hardware. This means that you can leverage PureApplication workload-deployment and lifecycle-management capabilities on your existing hardware.
This is an important change which brings further flexibility and options: you now no longer have to purchase IBM specific hardware to be installed in your data centre to enjoy the benefits of PureApplication patterns accelerating and guaranteeing consistency in your deployments.
Tread With Caution
Now, this isn’t such a good thing as it may first appear. Yes, you can run it on your own hardware now, but you also have to Bring Your Own Vsphere – a management overhead.
You also have to manage your own network and storage – another management overhead. You may say that this is what you do already, and I would agree. However, the purist’s view is that we’re missing the point – we should be heralding the new dawn of converged infrastructure. I’m not convinced that this is not a false dawn and that many companies are not ready to embrace converged infrastructure, just yet.
PureApplication software opens up a few new ways to get that great stuff into your business. You can use it in smaller quantities than the hardware version so you could, say, sniff test, a new project before committing to more. It also allows you to try something out on a few boxes that you already have without committing to new hardware. Also, if you’ve already got licences for WAS and DB2 and all the other IBM software then you can bring them to the party as well. All with the full backing of all the patterns without the converged infrastructure “big box”.
Chef Support
So, that’s the biggie for me; the next most important feature that IBM are committing to is Chef support. Now, it’s quite a complicated story as to how chef support fits into your PureApplication lifecycle but it’s enough to say for now that you can bring your own Chef recipes along and re-use any that are out there. BTW: This also shows that IBM thinks that Chef is winning the battle in this space – I would probably agree!
Docker Support
In the same vein as Chef, IBM is supporting Docker containers. For those who don’t know what Docker is – that’ll have to be another blog I’m afraid. But suffice to say that it gives you another opportunity to bring pattern content to the platform by using readily available patterns already in the community – or make your own of course! There are two things here that you should be aware of: firstly, there aren’t as many containers of quality out there as you may think so you may well end up making your own when you didn’t want to. However, the second, and most important point is that Docker excels when its hosting stateless apps. Now, that’s fine but, as an ex-IBMer who’s seen this many times over the years, I am sure that someone will forget that pretty quickly and their application will retain state in the container and come a cropper just when they didn’t want it to – be aware!
Problems Solved
So, that’s the overview of the latest and greatest in PureApplication. There’s some great innovation going on here and IBM are, in my opinion, still leading the field in this space “by a country mile”, as they say in the UK. By far the best new feature here is the PureApplication Software and I urge you to check it out and consider PureApplication afresh. If you’ve dismissed it before because of its form-factor – those problems have just gone away.
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