IBM Lets You Take PureSystems For A Spin On SmartCloud

July 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The new PureSystem modular and hybrid systems from IBM are both familiar and different at the same time, and will require a little tire kicking before customers are comfortable making the switch from standalone machines to converged boxes. That’s why IBM is offering trial capacity for 90 days to customers who want to take PureSystems out for a spin.

The offer, which you can sign up for here at IBM’s developerWorks development web site, was quietly announced on June 1 as a beta program and is available in 59 countries around the world spanning all geographies. The PureSystems are back-ending a portion of IBM’s SmartCloud Application Services public cloud, and the purpose of this particular free trial is not to give you capacity to test, but rather to give developers and system administrators hands-on experience in creating the “patterns of expertise” that automate the deployment of third-party and homegrown applications on PureSystems setups.

A program called Workload Deployer is at the heart of this patterning software and is unfamiliar to a lot of users; it has been a part of the WebSphere family of tools since IBM acquired it. (I’ll be honest, I can’t remember the name of the company IBM bought to get the software, or when.) We covered this patterning and automation software back in April in IBM Rolls Out iTunes-Like Store For Enterprise Apps.

If you don’t want to go to the cloud and you have a spare partition to play with, you can also download the Virtual Pattern Kit for Developers from the developerWorks site from the same page and run it on your own iron. There are online video demonstrations and tech guides to walk you through the SmartCloud PureSystem slice or the Virtual Pattern Kit. Once you develop a pattern, if you are a third party you can upload it into IBM’s PureSystems Centre, which is that iTunes-like catalog for these patterns of expertise to be distributed along with software.