Most of the new data-center-in-a-box unified systems fielded in the last two years fit somewhere along a continuum between fully pre-defined and unchangeable but highly integrated systems and highly configurable but less well integrated choices on the other end. IBM PureSystems, says Wikibon Co-Founder and Principal Analyst David Vellante, breaks that mode by offering both. Customers can order a standard box or have it customized to better fit their needs and intended workload, and either way it is a single SKU and arrives fully pre-configured and tightly integrated. So how, he asked IBM PureSystems VP James Gartner, did IBM break the mold?

The key, Gartner revealed in an interview in the Cube from the IBM Information OnDemand conference in Las Vegas, is the management platform at the center of the PureSystems technology. IBM, he said, spent a million hours developing it. What it provides is a single UI for management, maintenance, monitoring, and upgrading the system. It means for instance that a system upgrade can be affected with a single upgrade installation in a couple of hours without taking the system out of production, instead of requiring dozens of separate upgrades to different components.

It also means that IT staff do not have to know or worry about the components in the box. “We don’t want you to know what’s in the box,” he said. Instead of worrying about low-level issues, that frees IT staff to focus on higher level activities.

That starts with initial installation. PureSystems units arrive fully configured out of the box. They can plug directly into the existing infrastructure in the data center and be in full production in as little as four hours rather than requiring days or weeks of setup, tuning, and testing. PureSystems can run legacy software without changes, and software installation, like everything else, is accomplished through the same central UI and management system that runs the box.

CIOs, Gartner says, would love to devote more of their limited resources, both staff and money, to developing new solutions that can take the company into new markets, support new business initiatives, and create competitive advantage. But surveys show that most IT groups spend 50%-60% of their money and staff time just keeping the lights on, most of it on low-level maintenance of existing infrastructure.

PureSystems is designed to help CIOs change that equation by providing a highly integrated, advanced system with fully automated management that frees staff for those new products. For instance, PureSystems comes with integrated disk/solid state storage. The management system constantly monitors the disk system, identifying hot spots and moving them to solid state. That provides a 2X to 3X performance improvement, and it is totally automated, requiring no staff attention.

The market response since PureSystems was introduced in June has been terrific, Gartner said. What particularly excites him is that many of the sales are to new IBM customers. The older big IT shops have been a little slower to get on the PureSystems bandwagon. For instance, IBM installed a PureSystems box in Inner Mongolia to support a cloud system.

It is also driving the dev/ops trend among early PureSystems adopters. By simplifying the infrastructure radically, it frees operations from all the low-level concerns, allowing a single staff to handle both sides of the dev/ops dichotomy.

Overall, he said, PureSystems is the key to cloud and to the cost and staff time savings that can allow CIOs to change the focus of the IT organization from keeping the lights on to developing the next generation services that will allow the organization to take advantage of new business opportunities.