IBM Power Systems Reviews

We use IBM Power Systems for bank systems and databases. All banking systems use IBM Power Systems. Our additional operating and virtual and vRO systems, expansion systems, everything is IBM.

IBM Power Systems get updated every two years and are scalable and stable. It is 99.99% easy to update.

Power VMA integrations are unique to IBM in that they are free.

In my country, there are power supply interruptions. IBM could find ways to make the product stable through these interruptions.

Also, each time we have to go outside the storage, it fails.

We've used IBM Power Systems for about 12 years.

The product is stable.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The service and support are up-to-date.

Positive

The initial setup is not complex. You just connect it to the systems, the PCs, and all the laptops before starting.

We deployed the product ourselves.

The machine is good and has a comparatively good price.

A second option after IBM Power Systems is HP Unix servers.

IBM is better than HP Because IBM is a product where all things have to be integrated, including the operating system. But HP is just software.

The IBM product is one of the first power supply systems in the world, and the second is HP. I rate IBM Power Systems a ten out of ten. The only issue is that my country has unreliable power systems.

I am a system administrator, and I work with AS/400. I take care of the upgrades. I am also making the CL programs (CLP) and working on RPG skills for myself. 

We have multiple environments. We have Power9, Power8, and Power7. V7R4 is the latest one out there, but V7R3 is the latest one that we have. Companies don't deploy the latest version unless they are sure, and they have got feedback from others about the version. We also have disaster recovery and backup machines.

The flashcopy feature is helping us so much. It reduces time . For example, if we want to have a backup on a machine, we can flashcopy it to another environment, and this first machine is free to use.

Power System is like a dream solution for every IT person because it has redundancy, and it doesn't stop. It doesn't get affected easily.

I don't see any weaknesses in this solution. At the moment, we have Power8. It is stable and runs smoothly. We have a big load, and it is working very well.

The redundancy in Power machines is very important and it gives stability and feasability on all levels. Power systems can integrade different types of storage, which gives the advantage to combine all your storage capacity especially if you go for virrualization.

In Power6, latency was an issue, but nowadays, we are on Power8, which doesn't have any such problems.

Sometimes, we can have issues when we are moving or migrating to a newer version, which is the case with almost every company. Some new issues or problems show up suddenly, and you do not have the time to research and find the solution. That's when we contact IBM technical support. 

It is incredibly stable.

We use IBM technical support not so much per year because everything is clear and has procedure, and most of the time all migrations or upgrades will be prepared and tested before moving to production environment. Sometimes, we face complications while moving to a newer version, where we share such cases with IBMi team. It is very seldom when we do not have the time to research and find the solution. That's when we contact IBM technical support.

We are also in contact with the application supplier, who can provide any request from our side with the fix needed. The deployment will be at our level, first on the testing environment and after the result will meet our team expectations, we deploy it on the production environment.

I didn't use any solution previously.

We are a team of three people. We are responsible for the deployment of the database as well as switching from one machine to another.

We are responsible for OS upgrade. When we are moving from one version to another, sometimes I make plans for that. I also take charge of some other parts because we share everything in the team.

I would say if you are not using the IBMi solution, you are missing something. You should at least know about this solution. I was an IT support previously, and When I started to use IBM Power Systems, I fell in love with this machine due the professionalism, solidity and high scalability . 

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is how not to have a single instance of failure. These machines don't die and don't have any problems. For me, it was astonishing to be able to switch disks or the power supply without turning off the machine. It is a reliable and great solution.

I would rate IBM Power Systems a nine out of ten.

We are consultants. Usually, those permissions are provided for core banking operations, so we need to do the infrastructure sizing first.

We tailor the hardware to their specific needs. 

It is primarily used for core banking solutions.

Compared to x86 platforms, their reliability is unbeatable. They also excel in security, especially with specific features like HIPs, Postgres, intrusion prevention systems, and even built-in AI for specific goals. 

Additionally, the processing power is far superior, especially with the RSA feature for reliability, serviceability, and availability.

We've found that sometimes, certain setups require better servers. Ideally, the next level of model that IBM offers would be perfect for those situations.

Sometimes, the availability of additional services can be a challenge for some software. Certain IBM software takes time to deliver to the client. It can be slow.

So deployment is an area for improvement.

We have been familiar with this product for about nine years. 

It's very, very stable. I've never seen it go down for any reason. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. 

IBM is much more stable than Oracle or HPE. We find it the most stable system in the market.

Scalability depends on the person scaling the solution. Web applications do the horizontal scaling, while databases get vertical scaling. We keep 30-45% of the headroom for future needs.

Scalability depends on who sizes the hardware. If they choose the right configuration, it can be very scalable. 

I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. Our clients are mostly enterprise businesses.

We've been getting excellent service from IBM resellers and their management teams.

The resources and support depend on location. For example, metro cities get better service.

Positive

We had Oracle SPARC.

It definitely requires more expertise than x86 systems, especially considering the importance of reliability and availability for our clients' banking solutions.

So, I would rate my experience with the initial setup a seven out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is simple.

The hardware installation itself is quick, but migrating data from old systems or integrating new solutions can take time. Usually, it's anywhere from a few weeks to a month or two, depending on the complexity of the application being migrated. Usually, a team of three to four people is needed.

It's more about the value you get for the price. Considering its stability and performance, the pricing is good. So, it is fairly priced after getting a good discount. In India, we get a good discount. 

If your application is designed for IBM OS servers, it can be a very stable and reliable solution. Otherwise, it might not be the best fit.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

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.

We are a special case, because what we want is the cheapest Power box we can get in all of our locations. That is not the way the industry is moving.

Cloud would be a great option, if you didn't get the worst internet connections in the world in very remote locations. That's where we are in a kind of unique situation. We have to have the processing power at a location, but we don't have the luxury of a good internet connection. In some cases, we have DSL. That goes down for days. You can't have a Cloud-based solution. You have to have something that can process on-site and retain and then batch upload data.

The lack of software vendors moving onto the platform, as opposed to fleeing the platform, is an issue.

I have been using Power since the early 90's. Right now I'm using version 4, all the way up to 7+. I'm using it for AIX. I would definitely be interested in upgrading to POWER8 in the future, but it comes down to cost. It's always cost, especially in retail.

We transitioned not too long ago from POWER6 to POWER7 equipment. Literally, it was just moving the Powers from one system to another. There were no questions about compatibility, it was just a move from here to here. You take care of some base prerequisites and you are done.  

OS upgrades are non issues. You just do them. Typically, we're only doing them because a vendor or an application needs it, but they work. Often there is very little downtime and no need to roll back, it just works. The same can't be said for a lot of the competitors' products.

Both software and hardware support are wonderful. They are very responsive and knowledgeable. We deal with the field service technicians, the IBM CEs all the time. Usually it takes only one visit to fix the problem, which is huge. They get stuff done. 

Whereas, with some other two-digit vendors, two-letter vendors, that is not the case. In fact, we even saw discrepancies between IBM's Power and Lenovo's x86 support structure. We've actually moved some of our x86 systems away from Lenovo because the support structure isn't as good as what we were used to.

Setup was a non-issue. The upgrades are complex, but it's easy to figure out what you have to do.

Power certainly isn't a great value proposition. A lot of that has to do with the fact that everybody else in our industry, from a software or maintenance standpoint, is moving away from it. 

Because of the cost I am rating them a six.

It is designed for a large workload, as opposed to a small workload. For our circumstances, and even as an independent, I can't buy a Power system to experiment on. It can't happen. You cannot buy them.

Even if you can buy them, I don't have $6000 to $10,000 to drop on a toy.  As far as I know, there is no enthusiast. There is no developer world to do that. You either have to have a big, massive system working for a corporation or you don't touch it. It's a non-starter, as far as open source software is concerned. Either you're doing it for a business, or it's not happening. That's when there are huge problems.

I consider other options all of the time but it's simpler to just keep going with what we have. 

We also like what Power does. It's very reliable and very powerful. And because of the code compatibility we are able to run the same programs today that we did back in 1992. That has a lot to do with it. There is no cost to upgrade the software side of things. It's just a hardware upgrade, in some cases.

Ten or 15 years ago, software would have been written. There would have been Linux and Power, and maybe Windows, but nowadays it's Linux or it's the Cloud. You can run Linux on Power, but not for what these clients want. They want x86. They want Intel software, Red Hat or centOS on x86. 

Our software vendors, at least in our retail locations, are moving away from supporting Power. In fact, I'm shocked that they do some days. Whereas, our datacenter loads, those stay the same. Those are still going to be continuing to run what they are, because most of the major players, database systems and ERP systems, still continue to support Power.

I would not consider IBM to be a market leader in terms of servers. The reason is because if you go around and you ask people about a server, they don't talk about IBM. Maybe 10 years ago they did, but now it's HP. It's maybe Lenovo and it's Dell.  When you start talking servers, people don't think IBM. They think x86. That's where IBM dropped the ball, in some regards, because why would I think of them?

I can't buy them. I can't get them on the used market. I can't run them. I can't develop software for them. Though it's a different situation when you talk about the Cloud. That's when people tend to think more about IBM.

Most of our landscape is on IBM Power Systems.

IBM Power Systems' best features are its reliability, resilience, and performance per rack unit. IBM Power Systems gives a 75% reduction compared to Intel.

One of the main challenges with IBM Power Systems is the functionality of live partnership mobility. When you're running an L4 on one physical machine, and you want to migrate to another physical machine running live, it's very cost-intensive. In addition, IBM Power Systems is less user-friendly than competitors like VMware or Hyper-V. With IBM Power, you have to go to a command line and configure things one by one. In the next release, I would like IBM Power Systems to include a visual operational management console where I can manage all my IBM Power machines end-to-end. I would also like to see hyperconverged systems with their own storage.

I've been using IBM Power Systems for a year and a half.

IBM Power is pretty stable - I would rate its stability at 4.5 out of 5.

IBM Power is scalable - the amount of memory and number of CPU codes that one system can host is twice that of an Intel machine.

IBM takes its support very seriously - whenever you contact them for support, the people who onboard will know how to resolve the issue smoothly. Also, because IBM owns all the hardware in its machines, they don't refer you anywhere else, they take care of everything themselves.

Positive

IBM Power is a bit complicated to set up compared to Intel-based hypervisors. 

Everything that is available on the cloud version is available on-prem as well. IBM Power is more expensive than other rack-mount servers, and you have to have a license for everything, including cores and memory.

I would give IBM Power a rating of nine out of ten.

My company uses IBM Power Systems for databases with Oracle and some IBM solutions.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the hardware is really good and reliable.

Speaking about the disadvantages, the tools available to manage IBM Power Systems are not that good. My company also uses VMware, which is easy to use. In IBM Power Systems, things can get complicated when you try to manage the platform.

Price and complexity related to the management of the solution are areas of concern in the solution where improvements are required.

I have been using IBM Power Systems for fifteen years.

Even though my company does have connections with a local partner of IBM, whenever we need direct support from IBM, it can be difficult to get support because even though they say that they support technologies from other vendors, we face a lot of issues in my company when we try to deploy machine since there are a lot of issues in this software of those machines provided by other vendors.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Oracle SPARC is one of the solutions with which my company has some experience. My company switched from Oracle to IBM since we faced some problems with Oracle, from whom we had purchased eight SPARC T4-1 Servers. The problem arose when we had to create a new contact to support Oracle SPARC T4-1 Servers, and Oracle never cared to help us. Rather than resolving our issues, Oracle told my company that we could either migrate to the cloud or buy new servers from them.

The initial setup of the product is complex. In our company, we had an instructor from IBM who told us IBM prefers to make the setup phase difficult. In other platforms, the deployment phase can be completed with a few clicks, but with IBM, you need to do a lot of steps even though the end result may not be as good as you expected.

IBM Power Systems is a really expensive product.

With IBM Power Systems, you get to use IBM PowerVC, which allows you to automate the deployment process of virtual machines in the platform, especially those virtual machines that are a mix of virtual and physical machines. The definition of virtual machines may seem illogical since we also use physical machines.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

We use the solution primarily to provide services for the employees in our institute. Basically, it's the domain active directory. We also use it for its own server and providing the internet and our email server. We shifted recently to the Microsoft Product F365. We got the enterprise license for that as well. We don't use it to provide cloud services. We actually provide local services.

The older version of the servers that we had was the Dell Edge. The Dell Edge was a very old model and it had limited hardware capability and storage capacity. We had unfortunately faced some problems with providing for the new services due to these limitations. I'm talking about financially providing for the new service. 

The improvement was quite noticeable when we did the upgrade. We had faster service, better internet connection, and a more stable internet connection. We had a very stable active directory. I would say that whenever the users wanted to log in, we had no delays in creating the user profile and having the user access the server services such as Outlook or the internet. A firewall was installed also. The improvements were on a network scale, as well as the scale of the service. 

What we like the most is the ability to upgrade the scaling of the system itself. Whenever we need extra storage, we can do that. Whenever we need extra memory, we can do that as well. It's fast and it's available.

Thus far, the solution has been sufficient. I can't think of an area that really needs improvement at this time.

For the time being, our need is limited to certain features that are completely available in the Power Systems that we use. I can't say that we need an extra feature, or, at least, not in the near future.

The pricing of the product could always be lowered.

I've been dealing with the solution for two years. It was purchased in late 2019.

It's not the hardware itself that's unstable as much as it is the software. The hardware is stable enough. However, the software from time to time requires maintenance, and that requires us to reinstall some of the features. Sometimes we face problems with upgrading to newer versions or updates. Occasionally, we have to revert back to an older version. That said, in terms of the hardware itself, it's stable enough. We haven't had any failures so far in the hardware, with the exception of hard drives.

The scalability of the solution is excellent. It's very easy to scale and you can expand as much as you need to rather quickly.

Currently, we have between 350 and 450 users that access the solution.

In general, we do plan to increase usage. We're looking to have another server installed on a different site to upgrade the existing one. Right now, they're getting their services via a link from our servers, however, we are required to have a dedicated server on that different site to provide them with the services directly.

We have divisions. Everyone has their specialty in terms of maintaining the servers. In terms of software, we have a system administrator that takes care of the software. In terms of hardware, we directly communicate with the service provider. They come and they take a look if, and only if we require some upgrades. That said, there's been no hardware failure before. 

What we do is if there is any upgrade done to the servers, we use a tender system. We announce that we need an upgrade, and three companies come forward saying that we provide this upgrade to this system that you have, and we usually select the proper one either by price or by standards. If they meet the standards of the upgrade that we need, then they do that. However, if we require services for the hardware that we have in the company, then the one that we bought the hardware from is the one who does the service. The agent of IBM is local. He knows the servers, and he does the maintenance on them.

The initial setup wasn't complex at all. We were familiar with how the systems are and the system that we wanted to install. The shifting from an older generation, an older server, to the new server wasn't done, actually. We had a freshly installed active directory. We improved the structure during the shifting phases. The only thing that we actually did for deployment was that we had the deployment imaging ready when we did it, and we customized it based on a virtual machine.

When we installed the virtual machine, we did the testing to scale the deployment prior to the arrival of the servers, and then we did the installation directly. We had everything ready. The only thing that we shifted was the user data from the old server to the new server. That took a while. Other than that, the deployment was straightforward.

The cost could always be lower to make it more affordable to organizations.

We did look at Dell Systems, however, they were very expensive.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with IBM.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten so far.

While every organization has to choose its options based on their requirements, I can say that this particular solution has met our needs quite well.

• 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%.

I think IBM needs a little more work on managing the overall environment with eliminating Systems Director. They need something that you can use to manage the entire environment; it's kind of where they're going with PowerVC, but with the POWER5, 6 and 7 they're out in the cold now. It's just upgrading to 8 and managing everything with PowerVC, then it will be a lot easier. But any of the older technology is going to be out in the cold, managing one at a time.

We've been using Power for 10 years. We're running versions 5 through 8.

Lots of issues, but with hardware an issue we faced with our POWER7s has been the voltage regulators. IBM has been pretty good about that. They've been keeping voltage regulators onsite, so that if we do have an issue they're able to replace them in an expedient amount of time.

It's very scalable. That's one of the advantages of Power, the ability to isolate every LPAR, whereas with Oracle using the containers, you have a global container, so it's difficult to segregate those. The way the Hypervisor does it on Power, you can actually have PCI and non-PCI on the same physical asset and still maintain PCI compliancy, but on x86, on Oracle, you cannot do that.

Our SSRs in our primary datacenter are fabulous. We have one SSR, he's onsite almost every day. We actually have an office for him whether he's working on our work or he's working on the other customers that he supports. It doesn't matter, we give him the access to our site too. He's a very valuable member of our team, even though he's an IBM SSR.

We were a large Solaris shop, so we had a lot of Sun and we outsourced to IGS. When IGS came in we started replacing a lot of the Sun with Power.

Hardware upgrades, now that we're with our virtualization, is pretty simple. We just LPM from one to the other. 

The software is a little more complex than I think it should be. I think there is some stuff that they could do with the patch bundles. They call it a patch bundle, but really it's not a bundle. There are a bunch of patches there, and you have to do an MGET and get all of them at once instead of it being one tar bundle, and you just download that tar bundle and then untar it. Then you have them. If your LTP fails during the download, it's like, "Well I didn't get them all, so, which one did I get?" Let me just erase everything and restart. 

I'd rather just grab a tarball and untar it and that way I'd have the readme right there in that uncompressed location. 

It's some of the stuff that they have like their VIO, I just downloaded the VIO DVD one, DVD two; I think it's the expanded tool kit. They're all compressed differently. One is a raw ISO, one is a compressed ISO, and the other one was a gzip tar file. I'm thinking, "Why aren't they all the same?"

Some of that gets a little irritating but you just have to deal with it and, hopefully, somebody will realize it and fix it.

In terms of the upgrades, moving from previous versions to POWER8, I absolutely see a return on investment. We're virtualizing it, and being able to share across the multiple organizations that we support, we're able to push the utilization upwards of 70%. 

Previously we would create physical LPARs and there would be one or two LPARs and we'd only be utilizing 10% of a 770, or the 570s, or 670s. So it was a got a million dollar system, and we were using 10%. That's $100,000 worth of use, $900,000 is not being used. 

Now we're pushing that utilization to where we have a lot more virtual LPARs and we're actually using that full system instead of having ten million-dollar systems. We have one million-dollar system and we're using ten virtuals on it.

We use competitors, Intel-based Linux.

IBM is moving faster with their improvements than we can implement. Coming here, to the Power User Conference, to learn the new features means I then go home and try to implement this feature and see how we can actually make this a value add for our organization.

Power is the best. There's not much that can beat the way they virtualize it. And the HMCs, being able to manage the entire environment.

They're definitely a leader. They lack the advertisement to new corporate CEOs. You're starting to see more advertisements of Watson. But AIX... the Power environment and the value add that it has over Intel, not so much. Everybody thinks that Intel is so much more cheaper than the IBM, but it's because it's not marketed correctly. 

With Power servers, you get so much included with your purchase. You get the virtualization, you get the operating systems. Whereas, with Intel, you get hardware and then you have to add all of the operating systems, the virtualization if you're using VMware. And once you start adding that up, that commodity server is now only hundreds of dollars difference from an IBM server. A lot of corporations aren't looking at it that way.