IBM Power Systems Reviews

I think the biggest driving factor for the bank is the cost, the cost-performance profile, it's better than anything else.

If you virtualize, Power hardware allows you to oversubscribe CPUs, and we take a big advantage of that for the bank. We save the bank millions of dollars by oversubscribing, because we have probably 700 DevOp servers, where they develop software. The developer might have 40 or 50 servers. They don't run them all at the same time, maybe three or four of them do. So we give those 40 or 50 servers just a couple of CPUs. We way oversubscribe. In fact, IBM-ers raise their eyebrows when we tell them our oversubscription rate.

The virtualization. Power was the first solution to have it. Now everybody does virtualization, like VMware, etc. But Power was there a long time before everybody else. 

We virtualize everything, we're about 95% virtual. The virtualization and the quality you get from it is one reason we like the solution.

• HMC
• PowerVM

It allows us to share the resources with multiple lines of businesses. That's one issue we had with one line of business, purchasing a physical server then it would be dedicated to that line of business. There would be one OS on it so a lot of the resources were not utilized. Now with PowerVM, we're actually able to sell them the LPAR itself and the corporate entity can purchase the physical asset. This allows us to push the utilization up to 70 to 80%.

We use the solution for call banking and other critical applications.

In general, we provide services to customers more quickly, with faster application performance and no downtime. Our boxes are highly resilient and redundant, thanks to their work components and servers, which ensure high availability.

The Power hardware is rock-solid and reliable. You can't really ask for better hardware support, software support and reliability of the equipment. It is very powerful for what it does. 

From a reliability standpoint it has provided us with excellent performance. 

We are in retail and we can't send technical people out to retail locations. We have to have a system that is very reliable, that will basically run 24/7, 365. In some cases, we have had the same chassis in a location for 10 years. For the most part, it takes its normal fans and power drives and power supplies, but it's the same chassis that has been sitting there running. That's why we continue to purchase IBM and Power equipment.

The Power Systems can oftentimes be a tough sell because it is much more expensive than Commodity X86 hardware. But it's not a dollars and cents kind of thing. It's the fact that we don't spend dollars and cents. It's the reliability. The fact that we've been able to use the same procedures and processes in our stores for so long is a huge benefit.

In 2013, I joined IBM Pakistan as an IT specialist. Where I used to work as a system manager, the guy who used to work with Power Systems, with OSAIX and IBM storage. Then, I was shifted to IBM Europe in the Czech Republic. There's a CIC center in Brno, where I've worked with IBM as well, but as a third-level support guy. Now I'm based in Qatar, and worked for  government organization. I work as a system specialist for the Power Systems and the unit support as well, the operation stuff. I worked for eight years or more before this AIX and Power Systems and storage. 

I worked as an operations guy for whole IT operations and as well as the implementation. Because there were so many clients from the banking sector, from the government sector, and telecom industry, they mostly have the billing systems on the Power Systems. 

Now, I work as a unified system specialist.

IBM Power Systems is mostly used for specific IBM products because the system AIX is actually propriety of IBM. You cannot install it on any other platform. You can use it in different domains, like SAP HANA, do rack data and rack warehouses. Users in the telecommunication use it. They were using as an IBM Middleware product. An IBM Middleware product was being used solely on the Power Systems.

IBM has started supporting Red Hat, so people use Red Hat and some clients do put it in a cloud environment as well. The core baking system runs on that because most of the core banking like Oracle Financials are being used on this.

The use case depends on what the customer requirement is.

I started working with Power4 back in 2012, and almost Power4, Power5, 6, 7, 8, and now I am working with Power9 as well.

The banking environment was running the physical servers of like five to six stacks. The utilization of the physical space they were renting out reduced. It enables them to save space. Because when you're leasing, space counts. They were saving quite a healthy amount of money.

The maintenance of the physical hardware is more complex because there were different systems running and you need to go directly into the data center to use it. Now, when it comes to Power Systems, they were using the virtual system and were sitting on centers to verify if there was a hardware failure.

It also saves the cost of having one person at the data center solely looking at data systems. This also saves costs.

When you're using five stack or six stacks, the power utilization of those servers will be high as compared to the two stacks. If you need to add more CPU resources, compute resources to the server, adding those to a physical server is sometimes impossible because there is limited capacity. But when it comes to IBM Power, they have high compute resources. You can add it and you can utilize it. It comes with five or six years of planning. If you have planning and a good planner, then you can use the system for the next four, five years, and that can easily fulfill your requirements. 

Specifically about System i, it's simple, it's secure, it has a lot of resiliency. As far as I know, we've never been attacked by a virus.

I've been supporting core banking for the past 15 to 20 years directly in Power, and before I was supporting banking in OS/390.

Power systems are compact, their licenses are not as expensive as OS/390, and they fit the banking solution. They're very easy to run and operate for computer operators. They're all menu driven, it's English driven, and you can have different languages. It's a great system. It works for me.

Security is one. But it's a total, comprehensive solution.

It's really good for banking. As a matter of fact, I know many banks that are using AS400s as their back end on Power. It scales a lot, you can just keep on adding frames, you can add on CPUs, you get capacity on demand, you can tune the machine very easily to handle different workloads. It's very efficient, it's secure, it's robust and resilient, you can add on disaster recovery and it's cool.

We've used IBM Power Systems in our passport and immigration department. It's a government-run department. 

We've also used it with a few SMEs. They required smaller versions offsite with our systems. We did sell an IBM system to a couple of universities where they had about 20,000 students. It's used in a variety of instances and environments.

I'm working for an IT company and our work is to sell the products, I'm not really a direct user of it. I can't really say much about the features as I'm not an end-user.

The product does offer co-marketing services to their partners.

The solution is the best product on the market.

The technical support that clients get from IBM is excellent.

We use the solution for Oracle databases mostly. We are trying to bring in some new workloads, like Open Shift and Linux. 

It's been very reliable for Oracle databases. The performance has been very good.