The have been assembled to excel at three common tasks within enterprise computing: business intelligence, near real-time data analysis and online transactional processing.

Each of these systems is "built to a particular application's purpose. They are integrated by design. It's not just a bundle of technology being pulled together," said Phil Francisco, IBM vice president of big data product management. The systems have been designed so they can be quickly installed and easily maintained.

IBM is not alone in offering pre-integrated systems for heavy workloads. Last week, Oracle , designed for similarly intensive workloads.

"We have a far different approach," than Oracle, said Pete McCaffrey, IBM's director of PureSystems marketing. Oracle has "a one-size-fits-all approach; we're optimizing for the specific type of data workload. That is why we are coming out with different models aligned to different workloads."

IBM designed one of the systems, PureData System for Transactions, for credit card processing and other fast-paced transactional duties in retail operations and financial services. These systems were designed to handle "high integrity and high scalability" workloads, Francisco said. This system has been designed for high performance, using a shared data clustered architecture.