Pulse Shows Pros of Appliance Computing to Fight Fraud

Large Appliances, Deep Planning Can Work

My big takeaway here is that this large appliance approach works by reducing the massive complexity that often results from vendor diversity in a solution. Of course, the other big takeaway is that Oracle is at cross purposes to firms that intend to grow or want to use redundancy to assure uptime. As I understand it, the mixed solution provided Pulse about 97 percent uptime, likely because of the complexity and the cost of redundancy. The HP/ReD appliance solution is at five nines (99.999 percent) and Pulse expects to approach seven nines, which is far closer to the high availability that a financial institution requires.

Keep in mind that this system is still in beta, at only 10 percent capacity and under a 12-month deployment target that, to date, has only slipped one month. At the same time, Pulse has done full load testing; part of the deployment has been to put in place strong metrics and benchmarks, and those are all holding.

In many ways, this is one of the most impressive deployments I have ever seen, largely because it was well-considered, well-planned, well-measured and benchmarked, backed by experienced people, and simple. Pulse also had the vendors on sight throughout the testing and implementation processes, which helped assure the solution's success. Pulse has showcased an impressive number of best practices with this equally impressive deployment.

Rob Enderle is president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group. Previously, he was the Senior Research Fellow for Forrester Research and the Giga Information Group. Prior to that he worked for IBM and held positions in Internal Audit, Competitive Analysis, Marketing, Finance and Security. Currently, Rob writes on emerging technology, security and Linux for a variety of publications and appears on national news TV shows that include CNBC, FOX, Bloomberg and NPR.

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