IBM has announced new systems combining hardware and analytic software for handling big data.

IBM’s new PureData Systems are part of its PureSystems range that IBM has been releasing since April 2012. The new systems are the latest result of a four-year, $2 billion research and development effort referred to internally in IBM as Project Sparta. They will let companies analyze petabytes of data in minutes that then “intelligently use those insights to support specific business goals such as marketing, sales and business operations”, according to IBM. If you’re still thinking the claims sound modest and achievable, IBM also says users can have the system up and running in 24 hours.

Three new models have been announced, optimized for transactional, operational and big data analytics. The analytics system is designed for data warehouse services, and IBM says has the largest library of in-database analytic functions on the market today. The operational analytics version can provide analysis results concurrently to more than 1000 business operations and is designed to be use in situations such as credit card processing and to track and predict real-time changes in supply and demand for energy and utilities.

More than 60 independent software vendors (ISVs) have already committed to support PureData System, and there are now over 200 solutions and applications that are optimized to run on the PureSystems integrated systems. The PureData System will start shipping to customers at the end of October.

PureSystems start with PureFlex, a collection of servers mounted in a rack with integrated storage and management software. PureApplication systems are based on this and add application management so third party and in-house applications can be easily deployed. Interestingly, PureData doesn’t at the moment run on PureFlex. Instead, it runs on IBM BladeCenter blade or Power Systems rack servers. Future versions will probably be available on PureFlex. PureData does use the same system management software as the other PureSystems systems. In terms of system software, PureData is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM DB2 10.1 Enterprise Server Edition.