People seem to be confused about what IBM's System S actually is. For a more technical look at their new offering I suggest these two posts:
<a href="http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/13/ibm-system-s-infosphere-streams-processing/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/13/ibm-system-s-infosphere-stre...</a>
<a href="http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/18/followup-on-ibm-system-sinfosphere-streams/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/18/followup-on-ibm-system-sinfo...</a><p>Quick summary:
It's for doing complex event processing of large streams of data. Think financial data or any other such sort of never ending flow of massive amounts of data that you would need to process very quickly to identify patterns and for other analysis such as determining when you hit certain thresholds or trends.<p>It's supposed to be very flexible so that it can act on a large amount of unstructured data as well as very scalable. It defines its own processing language too.
This sounds a bit too good to be true, and an awfully good way for IBM to sell it's consulting services. How can a system be capable of analyzing financial data, weather system, medical information, etc. without someone plugging in all of the data sources and explicitly telling the system how to correlate the data -- of course to do that you simply pay for a large helping of consulting... cha-ching!<p>Maybe I'm missing something fundamental (the article was vague) but I just don't see anything really new here. I read it as marketing.
What does "real-time" mean? Oh yeah, it means "faster than our competitors." And "stream" means "the Cell marketing team encouraged us to use the word 'stream' a lot."<p>Factor out those two buzzwords, and you have an article about IBM releasing some software that analyzes data really fast and helps you make decisions based on that data.<p>If newspapers are in such dire financial straits they really need to start charging for stuff like this.