Wednesday, September 28, 2011

IBM announces Smart Analytics System 5710

Last week (September 2011), IBM announced the Smart Analytics System 5710, which is a database appliance for business intelligence and data analytics targeted at the SMB market. The IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 is based on IBM System x, runs Linux, and includes InfoSphere Warehouse Departmental Edition and Cognos 10 Business Intelligence Reporting and Query.

The announcement of this appliance was somewhat lost in the shuffle of Oracle's marketing blitz for its similar Oracle Database Appliance, also announced last week. But IBM's offering is geared and pre-configured for quick deployment of analytics and business intelligence capabilities.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 is powered by the InfoSphere Warehouse Departmental Edition which is built on a DB2 data server, and features Optim Performance Manager, DB2 Workload Manager, Deep Compression and Multidimensional clustering.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 5710 provides key capabilities of reporting, analysis and dashboards to enable fast answers to key business questions delivered as a cost-effective solution designed for rapid deployment. It allows users to quickly extract maximum insight and value from multiple data sources and deliver a consistent view of information across all business channels.

It also provides cubing services giving users a multidimensional view of data stored in a relational database. Users can create, edit, import, export, and deploy cube models over the relational warehouse schema to perform deeper multi-dimensional analysis of multiple business variables improving both profitability and customer satisfaction. Cubing services also provide optimization techniques to dramatically improve the performance of OLAP queries.

Additionally, the powerful, yet simple, data mining capabilities enable integrated analytics of both structured and unstructured data in the system. Standard data mining models are supported and can be developed via drag and drop in an intuitive design environment.

So what does it cost? For a such a rich collection of software, the starting price is just under $50K. Furthermore, the new offering is part of the IBM Smart Analytics System family, which consists of solutions that span multiple hardware platforms and architectures, including the mainframe (System z).

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