IBM today introduced a new category of "expert integrated systems." Aim at competitors such as HP and Oracle, the new product line helps companies reduce time and money spent on complex information technology maintenance. IBM's expert integrated systems family - PureSystems - integrate all IT elements, both physical and virtual. The new systems family offers an alternative to today's enterprise computing model, where multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain.

With the introduction of the new PureSystems family, IBM is unveiling three advances designed to allow businesses to slash the costs and complexity associated with managing information technology.

- "Scale-In" System Design: With PureSystems, IBM is introducing a new concept in system design that integrates the server, storage, and networking into a highly automated, simple-to-manage machine. Scale-in design provides for increased density - PureSystems can handle twice as many applications compared to some IBM systems, doubling the computing power per square foot of data center space.

- Patterns of Expertise: IBM is embedding technology through software that allows the systems to automatically handle basic, time-consuming tasks such as configuration, upgrades, and application requirements.

- Cloud Ready integration: Out of the box, all PureSystems family members are built for the cloud, enabling corporations to create private, self-service cloud offerings that can scale up and down automatically.

PureSystems' scale-in design integrates and optimizes all of the critical components required in today's data center ? system networking, storage, compute, management, etc. -- and provides for a single-view management system. The result is a system that is intuitive to set up and can be far less expensive to maintain and upgrade.

At the center of the PureSystems is new software capability - "patterns of expertise" -- that enables operational know-how and knowledge to be built directly into the systems. Patterns are available in three categories:

- IBM Patterns: Built-in at the factory and created based on knowledge gleaned from IBM's IT managers, engineers and technology experts, these sets of patterns are designed to automate time-consuming tasks such as configuring, deploying and upgrading applications -- applications that used to take days to deploy can now be rolled out in hours, for example.

- ISV Patterns: IBM has teamed with independent software vendors to offer applications that are certified "PureSystems Ready." A new online catalogue of ISV Patterns, PureCentre, simplifies how applications are purchased, deployed and managed.

- Customer Patterns: IT organizations can package the knowledge of their own handcrafted applications into a Pattern. As a result, a company that is interested in expanding into new markets can do so even when skills are not readily available in new regions or markets.

With PureSystems, IBM is integrating all of the technology components needed to stand up a private cloud system in minutes. By combining the virtualized servers, storage and networking found in PureSystems with cloud management software, IT organizations have a ready-to-go "cloud system in a box" -- giving them a foundational private cloud environment that can be expanded. The PureSystems cloud is delivered with built-in security, with no single point of failure.

To accelerate the use of the cloud, IBM has included a cloud self-service and provisioning interface directly into PureSystems. An application developer, for example, can use the self-service feature to configure a cloud environment application without any help from the IT department. PureSystems will sense and respond to the needs of the running applications and services and make decisions on how best to deploy IT resources while ensuring maximum efficiency, performance, and control.

PureSystems integrates the same foundational technologies and software used in IBM's public SmartCloud Services offerings. As a result, by sharing common capabilities and interfaces, application developers can use IBM SmartCloud Services to create and test new applications.

The first two models of the PureSystems family -- PureFlex System and PureApplication System -- start shipping this quarter. PureSystems support POWER processors and Intel processors.

IBM's rivals Oracle, HP and Cisco Systems have been also pushing converged infrastructure, which integrates server, storage, networking and other technologies into a single managed architecture.