For years IBM has doggedly pursued the massive problem of pulling data strewn across the enterprise into an integrated, harmonious whole. At LinuxWorld, the company introduced <A HREF="http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/06/IBM-appliance-like-data-integration_1.html">IBM Information Server Blade, an appliance-like bundle</A> intended to make the Herculean task of enterprise data integration faster and easier.

IBM Information Server Blade includes an IBM BladeCenter HS21 with Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running Red Hat Linux, on top of which sits Information Server--a suite of data cleansing, information management, and data profiling tools built around a metadata repository. With the aid of IBM Workload Manager, the blade setup is configured as a grid, which IBM says is ideal for data integration tasks.