IBM Power Systems Reviews

• 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.

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.

Regarding new features, we like where it's going. I really can't think of something newer that they are not currently working on.

Except for Power on Linux. The licensing for software products, including IBM's products - it costs you more to run Linux on Power than it does AIX. That's something I would like to see them improve. We would like to go to Power Linux, but all the software that we are using - and I'm talking like IBM software, like Webster - they don't let you oversubscribe the software. It's not cost effective.  

If you didn't know better, if you didn't do these things, you probably wouldn't care and you would put Linux on Power. But if you take advantage of some of these real advanced features, for oversubscribing as an example, it's not supported on Linux on Power. So that stops us, in particular, from going that way.

Stability is great. The old saying was, you talked about the "five 9s" of reliability. We're at something like seven 9s. We've never really had a major outage. 

We've had outages, but it was the network that went down, or a SAN outage, or somebody, a person, pushed the wrong button. But the infrastructure itself, the IBM Power hardware has never failed us.

No issues. And we take advantage of that scalability. I have a few frames where we have over 200 servers on a frame.

We have IBM support. We are a big IBM user. In fact, we use their support for Middleware. They're excellent.

I'm not a good person to ask. This is what I do. To me it's easy, I think it's easy to learn. I think the one problem new people have is - and this isn't just something that relates to IBM - the phraseology is different. So something in VMware might mean something different in the Power world. The lingo, there's some new jargon, and new acronyms that you have to learn. But once you get around that, you realize this thing is the same as this other thing on another system; just a different word.

In terms of a move from version to version, and the return on investment from a move from POWER7 to 8, or from 5 to 6, I would say the software has gotten friendlier, more robust, easier to use, easier to upgrade. I think the advantages you get from going to POWER6, POWER7, POWER8 are a bigger thing than going from AIX 6 to 7.

On the hardware side the upgrades are great. With POWER8 we picked up SMT8, and that made a big improvement. If you have applications that can take advantage of it - we run mostly IBM software - so of course the software is enabled.

The cost model is great. There is so much built in to the technology, that if you know how to use it you can save yourself a lot of money. Again I'll go back to what I said earlier: We're saving millions of dollars on software cost by oversubscribing. I know a lot of other users that don't do that. Either they don't understand how some of the technology works, or they're afraid to try it. All the advanced features that are built into this platform we use.

To start out, I actually put the first Power systems in the bank. The first applications we were using, they only ran on Power. There's one application, that we call "wire transfer" - banks use that to transfer money to the Federal Reserve - and it only runs on AIX Power. That's what really got us going. Then, over time people realized it was a better. We used to be an HPE shop and over time we proved that we were better than HPE, and we just retired our last HPE server.

We're on all versions of Power. We just retired a POWER4 box, but we have POWER5, 6, 7, and 8. We have all these versions primarily because we're a bank, and we have a lot of old applications. It's hard to get people to upgrade their applications so we can upgrade their hardware. We use it strictly for AIX.

We're running about 1200 servers right now. I have a couple old POWER5 and POWER6 frames, as I said previously, but most of our stuff is on POWER8. We have about 18 870 enterprise servers, and that is where the bulk of our stuff is. We are trying to get everything over to the newer stuff.

Power uniquely positions our bank in the industry because we are almost 100% virtualized, so we're cloud-ready, if you will. In fact, we view our AIX environment as a private cloud at the bank. That is one of the big things. 

And the Power solution is a lot more customizable that many of the others. We have some unique infrastructure things at the bank that it fits perfectly.

In terms of some people saying they want less "green screen," less command line, they're talking about UNIX, and historically UNIX is a command-line type of interface, a text interface. We can do a GUI in AIX, and most people don't use it. In fact, the only time you see a GUI is when people are installing software, because Oracle or DB2 has a GUI install interface, so you have to fire up a GUI.

I think IBM is a leader in the server market. I'm an old guy, back when I got into AIX, the Sun servers - the big Sun 10Ks and 18Ks, the HP Superdomes - those were all the enterprise servers, those were the servers of choice. Then came Power AIX, now they're number one. There is no more Solaris. HPE is struggling, they finally quit making their own hardware. They are doing x86. The Power hardware is just so much better than x86 hardware.

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.

IBM could perhaps be a bit more aggressive in terms of marketing, and let customers really know that they're out there and can offer a helping hand to move them along, to implement all these great features. Because, in attending the classes here at the IBM Power Conference, over the years, every time they ask, "Are you on this latest and greatest feature?" many people are not there as yet. Yet the feature may have been announced a few years ago. Sometimes it's because companies need to have migration projects, and a bit of money and time to get this going.

IBM could be more aggressive in that area.

I know lab services does a lot of work but systems, if they could include some kind of lab services and bundling of services to get you to the greatest and latest feature at the already included cost... If you include the cost in the base machine, you pay for something once, or it's in your maintenance... because to go and ask for money every time, it's a problem.

Power systems, pretty much since they came out. I've been using AS400 system since the '90s, and I continue to use them, System i.

The upgrade from version to version is not complex. I think it's fairly straightforward and IBM provides a lot of documentation, check-listing, features, so all you've have to do is be methodical, go through the checklists step by step and it's fine.

No issues. If we needed capacity in an emergency, a few years back, we would call IBM if we had a problem. They could turn on a code and we could have an extra CPU. But these days, capacity is in pretty good shape. We have some resources we can move around to give the systems that need it more capacity, and we can move capacity dynamically.

And we know the workloads, so the machine is set to run dynamically. If we need capacity, we get it. We run things and we have all these monitoring capabilities, we monitor stuff, we send alerts and it works fine.

Some of our work is actually outsourced to IBM for the hardware. The hardware works fine, the Power hardware, it's amazing. Years back they had some 10-key disk drives that would tend to fail, but recently disk drives are really much improved, and you can do hot swap. You can pull a drive out, put a new one in.

Apart from disk drives, really and truly you don't see many hardware issues. You may have a power supply that fails, but because of all the redundancy, it's good.

And on the software side, there is hardly a need for support calls. The key is, as long as you're patching very often and you're up to date with the PTFs, it runs pretty well.

In terms of the upgrade from version to version, we see a return on investment, absolutely. There are always features, improvement, SQL and Java; on the hardware, on Power. 

With the technology, when I went from POWER5 to POWER6, I got a something like a 71% increase in horsepower. When I went from POWER6 to 7 I think it was a 20% improvement in CPW. And I believe from POWER7 to 8, I've been told it's either 75% or double.

So every time IBM comes out with a newer chip, great improvements.

Really mostly IBM for the workload that we run. IBM and the System i is very well suited for it, for the core banking systems.

Recently there have been a lot of changes, and a lot of good things that we are planning to use. What we've been seeing is that within the Power system itself, there are more and more capabilities and features. You do not have to go outside and buy a third-party program product - like for replication, you don't have to go to a third-party. Years ago, you'd have to go for system monitoring.

IBM is building in all the tools you need to run the system: monitoring, replication, disaster recovery. I think if IBM continues to do the same thing - and every day they're bringing the price point down, with more CPW - they should just keep on doing what they're doing.

I don't have a problem with Power systems, especially running System i. For people running AIX, the interface is a bit more cryptic and they need a lot of commands. But once you implement System i on Power, it's a 10. It rocks. We're doing some work in Mexico right now where we're converting from OS/390 to Power systems.

• AIX
• Reliability
• Performance, of course
• The ease of use
• It's really enterprise ready (whereas Linux is less enterprise ready)
• I would say that the best feature right now of Power is the license management. We use it for Oracle and WebSphere and it's good for that. As I said the reliability of the AIX OS and hardware is very good.

The only thing that I've seen over the last years - and I think it's getting better - would be to have stable service packs. Often I upgrade to a new version, a new service pack, and we need to put iFix over the service pack. I would like to have the service pack be really stable, or IBM saying, "This service pack is stable, but you should add this and this iFix as of right now." That would be better.

It would be an improvement if the cost went down, as well.

Mature and stable.

Great, but at our company we don't need the scalability that AIX and Power offer, so we are kind of in the medium range of requirement.

Good, and a lot better than other companies.

I would say pretty straightforward.

Mainly performance and flexibility is getting better and better. So I would say yes, slowly but steadily, we are seeing a return on investment of the expense in upgrading from the previous versions to the version we're using now.

We use a competitor, Intel-based Linux. We went with Power because of reliability, performance; it's a good product overall.

When I rated it 10 out of 10, I ignored the pricing. It's costly, so it's part of the business decision. Hardware prices put the brakes on some solutions.

I don't consider IBM to be a market leader in servers. They are in a very good position, but AIX is not sold to customers, it's not viewed as a prime solution.

I think they need to push more AIX, openly, there's not enough noise about it. It's quiet, it works, so we don't talk about it. It's a local initiative it's not a global initiative.

I use IBM Power Systems for databases.

The most valuable feature of IBM Power Systems is its performance.

IBM Power Systems could improve by having a cloud feature.

I have been using IBM Power Systems for approximately 15 years.

The stability of IBM Power Systems is good.

IBM Power Systems is scalable in my experience.

We have approximately 10,000 people using this solution in my organization. We do not plan to increase usage.

The support provided by IBM Power Systems is very good.

I have not used any other solution in the past.

The setup of IBM Power Systems is easy because I have experience with it before. The full deployment took approximately four months.

We used a partner for the implementation of the solution.

We have seven engineers that provide the maintenance and support of our IBM Power Systems.

The price of IBM Power Systems is expensive and could improve.

I have evaluated Oracle before we decided to choose IBM Power Systems.

I would advise those who want to use IBM Power Systems to always have technical support.

I rate IBM Power Systems a ten out of ten.

Right now we use Power for high-end AIX systems. We're always looking to leverage what we're using. We have some high-end customers on our P8s. The one thing that makes life easier is it's very dependable.

Power runs our resilient data systems, our high-end databases, stuff that can't go down. I enjoy the isolation factor, that it's not Linux, but then again it can be challenging to keep up. The Linux and VMware stuff, the administration seems to be a little easier than Power, but that's why I'm employed.

Licensing has always been an issue, but with IBM machines a serial number is licensed with support. If you don't pay for it, you don't get it. 

I would like to see firmware available to all of the systems. We have some older systems that we've taken off support, that we're not going get rid of right now, but I'm not able to legally update the firmware on that. That's just a little nitpick that I have.

I'd like them to make stuff that little bit more seamless, a little bit more user friendly. They have come a long way since the early days. You can deploy a system right now in minutes compared to days, in the early days. But that's what growth is all about.

Scalability is very seamless. The new enhanced GUI for the HMCs make adding partitions a lot easier than the classic view, so it's not as involved. I think they're trying to get more like the VMware side where you can add a machine, edit the properties, and turn it on, and go about your business.

We have some AIX 6 that we cannot upgrade because the customers will not let us upgrade it, and we've had to purchase extended support. We put everybody on 7 where we can. I personally have not seen the benchmarking between 6 and 7, but normally people are very comfortable when their mission-critical applications are on it. I'm comfortable with it. I'm comfortable with AIX in general, for mission-critical systems.

If I'm running a web server, or something I don't care if it goes down, I'll put that on Linux. But if I'm running a high-end database, accessing health records at 1000 transactions per second, I want it on a tried and true, supported operating system on high-end hardware.

We have CTS support. They're very white-glove, so I think it's top-notch.

I haven't had any experience in that. Normally we get a P7 box and it runs P7 forever; and we get a P8 box, and it runs P8.

We're an IBM/VMware shop, so all of our AIX runs on Power, and everything else is going to run on VMware. We're a composite type shop.

In terms of how Power uniquely positions us in the healtcare industry, it is an industry that has very little downtime. Nobody likes to take any downtime at all. The Power systems, they're very dependable. We can normally depend on them not going down. We have had a few issues here and there, but for the most it's a set-and-forget type thing.

They don't like to release the systems for updates, unless it's critical and I have to take it away from them. That's the thing I like the Power Systems, that they're just extremely dependable.

I think they've really started down a good path with the HMC; making people go to the enhanced GUI. I think not everybody embraces change, but once they get a hang of the new HMC, there's a lot of cool features in there.

In terms of IBM being a market leader for servers, obviously with the advent of Open Source, and Linux, and virtualization - while I don't do a lot of hardware - I think they're the "big boys." I think they probably need to be more vigilant about VMware and the like. VMware is not exactly eating their lunch because they're two separate business models. Obviously IBM is the leader. But, you can tell that other companies are nipping at their heels, and they want into that market share.

PowerHA, the high availability software. That is something that we like.

We are a partner to IBM, we do product development for IBM. We're not a customer of Power Systems. We are developing only on AIX and for all versions of Power, 6, 7, 8.

It helps in delivering mission critical applications, very high reliability. It doesn't fail, it's a very stable platform, very reliable, and the user interface is good. The administrative cost and expenses are also low. It's good.

Very stable, absolutely. POWER9 is expected in the market and that's going to be, I would say, revolutionary. It is going to turn around the market in terms of the market share, in favor of Power Systems. I would say that if the price point is right, and the execution is good, this can really be a very successful platform for mission critical applications in future.

Based on the architecture I do believe that it is very scalable. And with the POWER9 processor coming up I think scalability will be even better, because the processor speed will be much faster. I'm assuming you will not need so many cores to activate, to scale up. 

Power Systems have always been very, very scalable.

My engineering team closely works with the IBM team in some of this areas. I do believe that things are very smooth, in terms of the support and whatever we have to deliver.

I believe that the Power platform has a very high return on the initial investment because of the kind of scalability and the reliability that the system has. It also provides the ability to meet multiple workloads - with such high reliability - because of the PowerHA platform. 

The powerHA product that we are building on it is really making the product very reliable and very cost effective for the customer. So the the TCO, total cost of ownership, is really low when you compare it with x86 platform or any other platform.

The initial investment may be high, but at the end of the day you have to look at it from a three-year or five-year point of view. And that's where Power really scales way above any other computing platform.

In terms of how Power can uniquely position a company within its industry, it can be the most favored system for cognitive error. When I say "cognitive", of course, that is an IBM term. In the digital environment, where artificial intelligence is very important, there is machine learning been done, there are different kinds of applications coming up. Power Systems can be a very reliable platform for workloads which are mission critical, which are futuristic. There's a lot of work done on artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc.

In future versions I'm definitely very excited to see the roadmap of the Power PC, and the ability to connect with other GPUs like NVIDIA. NVLink is a very exciting development that happened in POWER8. I do believe, going forward, the ability to meet different workloads and multiple workloads, which are more intensive in terms of CPU and compute, is going to be the key and that's what I like about Power.

The OpenPOWER initiative is something, which is really great. It's embracing other Open Source, Linux as well as other platforms, so that you can give a total solution to the customer. You don't just have the applications, which are based only on AIX, you are making the platform more open for different kind of workloads to be done.

IBM has been the market leader for decades now, in this space. I do believe there is competition, but I think embracing OpenPOWER is an area which is going to really help IBM with the ability to meet the price performance that the market demands today. If that can happen, I do believe IBM is not only going to maintain its leadership position, it can even grow its position in terms of the market share for its systems and platforms.

The chip itself is a higher performing chip than x86 chips, and we get the IBM hardware on top of it.

To not have to manage the chipset or have the software or hardware really be a concern for us. It just runs itself.

This isn't really related to Power, it's related more to the OS system level, but instead of chasing the industry they should lead the industry. A lot of the things that are being deployed on Power now are things like Node.js and things of that nature. But they're chasing the market, they're not leading the market.

Since the beginning.

We have had issues, but they haven't been because of Power, they've been because of partner errors on our system.

The scalability is phenomenal as it scales up. I'm here at the Power Conference to learn about how I can possibly scale out with the Power systems.

They are very knowledgeable but there's some bureaucracy as far as the time to respond goes, as far as getting back to us with what we need.

They tend to request logs an awful lot when the solution doesn't always warrant that.

We started on a System/36 and grew into the AS/400 and we're still going with IBM i. It was always IBM because a lot of our code is written in-house. We're definitely planning on moving up to POWER 8 in the future.

The big version releases, as far as 5 to 6, and 6 to 7 were complicated. All the point releases were fairly straightforward.

In terms of the upgrades from previous versions, we definitely see a return on investment. We get more processor, more CPW, and it's basically the same price.

We are currently using version 7.2 with IBM i only.

I don't know that Power uniquely positions our business, it's more of what we do as a business to position ourselves, as far as our commitment to customer service and customer care.

I think they're definitely a leader in the server industry as far as Power goes. From what I've been hearing at this conference, they're doing a lot with the Power chip to help maintain that position. So, I'm happy with it.