IBM Power Systems Reviews

The banking sector primarily uses Power Systems. It is run on their core banking environments due to its stability, reliability, and availability. When it comes to the telecom sector, telecom sectors have been utilizing Power Systems for middleware applications and CR. 

There are many benefits. One Power Systems in a single rack is able to accommodate much more workloads by using physically less space and less power as compared to other platforms, like Intel. That is one benefit. 

Another benefit is that you can perform maintenance and activities. You can conduct a lot of maintenance activities without any outages in your business. 

When you're running Power Systems, it is owned and supported by IBM and AIX operating system is not an open-source operating system. It's an IBM proprietary system. It is built for IBM Power Systems specifically. It works exceptionally well because the hardware, and all the components, and the software, they're all built to work on IBM Power Systems.

Micro-Partitioning is where you can slice your physical code. If you have one code in a system, you can further slice it up to 20%. You can assign one virtual machine, which is called LPAR, 0.05 of a code. It allows you to more effectively use your available system resources. That includes your physical processes, your code, your memories, and allows you to dynamically increase them and decrease them whenever you need without any outage.

There are other features like Live Partition Mobility that allows you to move your workload from one physical Power Systems to another Power Systems, without an outage to the business. 

Active Memory Sharing dynamically adjusted your memory based on the requirements of the logical partition. 

Active Memory Expansion allows you to compress your memory on the run time to allow you to have less physical memory available, but provision more memory to your partitions, as everything will be compressed on the fly.

Reliability, availability, and serviceability of the IBM Policy Systems are unmatched. 99% of the maintenance activities can be performed online without having any outage for customers.

It does not offer the ability to run any X86 or X64 Intel architecture-based application on Power Systems. There are a lot of applications, lots of business use cases that do not support this architecture as of now. If somehow application tasks can be ported on to IBM Power Systems, that would be a big improvement.

Power Systems has dominance in terms of features, and the capability is much more powerful than the other competitors right now. Intel is the other primary platform. If you look at Intel x86 and compare it with Power Systems, all of the features are much more reliable, available and serviceable as compared to the Intel platform. The one thing that we lack is that a lot more applications are supported on the internet compared to Power Systems. That's one thing that we primarily lack.

I've been working with Power Systems since 2010. I just left IBM a few months ago. I delivered solutions that contained IBM Power Systems and deployed them in customers' infrastructure at an enterprise level.

I've primarily worked with AIX 6.1, 7.1 and the last one that I deployed was AIX 7.2.

The stability of IBM Power Systems along with the AIX operating system is unmatched. Once you are up and running, you will rarely face any outage. You cannot compare it to any other platform.

Once you are up and running and do not make any changes to your configuration, you will not face many issues. Errors and VFDs outages have been rare as well. If you do not make changes and keep your environment stable, you will not have any outages.

The processes are scalable. You can increase memory on the fly without any outages. With capacity on-demand you can purchase a Power Systems with selected physical cores, and memory activated. When you feel the need for that memory and you feel that you need excess capacity, then you can purchase the license for those, or you can get an hourly license and activate them as per your need and provide your business the extra power that it needs at that time.

For the maintenance, there are two types of components. One is the customer replaceable unit CRU and the FIU that IBM replaced. We have a call home feature that you can enable whenever there's a hardware failure or that sort of problem we'll call the particularly log with IBM, and then IBM supplies the part to the customer. If it is a customer replaceable unit, a single person will go to the data center and replace it.

The difficulty of the initial setup depends. If you talk to someone coming from VMware or Hyper-V, they will find it a bit complex, but if you talk to someone from Linux, they will find it a bit different initially, but with time it becomes very simple and easy to understand. 

IBM Power Systems has some tools, like power VC that is a private cloud on-prem. That allows you to do the whole deployment automatically via a very easy web-based user interface. 

The time it takes to deploy depends on how many virtual machines you need to run, the overall complexity of the solution, and if migrations are involved. The initial deployment can take around five days which includes the initial physical installation in the data center. Then the physical integration with the network, the transfer switches, and the storage is the customer infrastructure. After that, we configure the virtualization. If we configure a single little part, it would usually take you around five days.

As far as the infrastructure is concerned, a single person can deploy it. If the person deploying only has experience with Power Systems and does not have storage skills, you will need someone from the storage team as well to do the deployment. 

There are a lot of day-to-day administrative tasks. Problems that you face in a typical environment, you will not face on Power Systems. If you secure your environment, you can better focus on other productive tasks for your organization, other than spending time logging into your VMs and making changes after every little while and things like that. Your technical teams can offload a lot of the daily routine tasks.

You can compare Power Systems to Oracle Exadata. Oracle Exadata collects only for databases, but IBM Power Systems has a shared processor pool that we can allocate and using this shared processor, we can reduce the licensing cost for Oracle databases and achieve better performance when you combine it with IBM Flash System storage.

Solaris is unique. There are not any other platforms that I would compare to right now.

It's nothing to be scared of it. It might be completely different than what you have been using, but IBM Power Systems is very stable and supports the systems that we have already been using. The Private Cloud IAS offering is included free for all enterprise customers.

It is easy to administrate and manage IBM Power Systems to make the process of moving from VMware or other environments easy.

When you get Power Systems, you get points and after the initial deployment that is performed by IBM, using those points, you can get five days or 10 days of service from IBM. Those services include Power Systems training. If you have enough points, you can get IBM to deliver training. 

I would rate Power Systems an eight out of ten based on the new features that were launched recently. They made it available on the cloud. A customer getting a Power Systems in their environment on plan is very expensive. You can create a VM on the IBM or Google cloud, running on IBM Power Systems. Or you can get the PEP2 client code. There is a little hardware cost.

I think that it's reliability and availability. Also, the ability to scale and do some of the newer things with replication, with the storage. They help the Power to really stand out.

For me, personally, I've been around Power, IBM i, since it was System/38. It's been a long time. Personal knowledge of it is my strength. I can relay that into solutions for our customers.

For the i customers, I think that Power, the horsepower, has always been there. So, I would like to see something more on the lower end, where they would make it more cost effective for the small guy, rather than the big guy.

They need to work a little bit more with the smaller guys. Help to make it easier for them to move, to get going into the system. They need to be a little bit more competitive with the Intels of the world.

I think they still claim "five 9s" availability. I would have to agree. In my experience, starting out as a CE back in the day, they were always very reliable, very easy to fix when they did break. With some of the other RAS things that they've put into these boxes, they're the best.

The scalability is the great thing. You go from very small systems, mom-and-pop shops, to Fortune 100 companies. That's the biggest thing, the scalability.

We have worked with tech support for issues that have arisen. Sometimes, it's not really hardware related. A lot of times it's code related, but they're always very responsive and able to resolve the problems quickly.

In terms of the upgrade from different versions, I think after we got past the jump from Syst ARIS, back in the day; and then, when we went from versions like 6 to 7, or 5.4 to 6, those were the really tough versions. 

Now, the version upgrades are very smooth.

We do see return on investment by upgrading from version to version.

I don't think that it's so much power, speed; it's the feature functionality. Some of the newer things that you are able to do with the newer versions, more so than the old days, when it was, "We get X amount of speed." That doesn't happen as much as the new features that are available.

For example, some of the Java things they're doing. Some of the things security-wise, there are a lot of great enhancements.

We are strictly IBM.

We go with Power Systems because the reliability and the availability of the systems are key. They are the best systems, as far as reliability and availability go.

We are a business partner, so many of our customers use different versions from 5.4 up to 7.3. Most use IBM i. We do have customers that run POWER8, but we have other customers that are running on POWER5, POWER6. We're trying to get them to move to POWER8.

I would say IBM is a market leader in the server industry. It's hard because, for what my company does, as a business partner, we're not really placing too many new servers. But the customers we have are very loyal and very committed to the platform. I think that, as long as IBM takes care of the customers that they have - there is no better customer than the one you have - take care of those customers and they'll be fine.

I think the main thing that POWER8 is doing for the industry in general is it's leap frogging all the other technologies that exist out in the market from a performance capacity and total cost of ownership point of view. You can scale these servers up or scale out and replace a lot of footprint for other organizations. 

An IBM i customer is more of a traditional business, they've been around for a while, they've been running on IBM i for, maybe, a couple decades and for them it's all about being able to continue to move forward, maybe even scale down the size of the server, the footprint of the server, the energy consumption and all those things that come along with it.

Help Systems is a provider of IBM i and AIX systems management software. We use the server in our infrastructure to develop technology to solve customers' problems in automation. We're using POWER7 and POWER8 servers, highly partitioned, virtualized; using SAN storage to help us build up our development environments.

Our solutions include the top issue of the day which is security. Everybody's concerned about security, so we do that. We do automation software, which we've been doing for years, and then monitoring software also.

From a software developer standpoint, virtualization is really the key, as we can more easily spin up a new partition, virtual instance of IBM i. We can have it preloaded with our different softwares that we need to test out. To me it's a virtualization. We use that through having a SAN and POWER8 technology.

With POWER it has everything that we need from a scale up and scale out capacity, capability to stick lots of work and footprint on it. For IBM, the challenge that everybody has in the industry, and in the processor world, is that we've kind of hit the "knee" of the curve with Moore's law. Processors aren't getting faster. The neat thing about IBM is the innovation that they're doing to offload work from the processor and do more simultaneous things. 

I'm really excited about the artificial intelligence even if you don't always think of systems management companies like us being excited about that technology. But we have a lot of information too, and helping our customers more easily mine that - I see some great opportunities. 

And to better manage heterogeneous footprints of all the different operating systems that are out there across one common interface.

When we talk about cloud licensing, or maybe tenant-based licensing, definitely there's a shift in the marketplace in that more of our customers are looking at things like infrastructure as a service, where they're going to be having their IBM i footprint hosted by somebody else, maybe on somebody else's partitioning. Sister partitioned systems. So then licensing does become an issue in how do we take that on-prem customer perpetual license and convert it into something that they can consume as they go, because people are used to that with Amazon and other technologies.

The stability and scalability is why you invest in IBM i. You don't have issues. Like any organization, we have some other applications that run on non-IBM i stuff and to say that it's as reliable - it's not. With IMB i you know it's there, you don't even think about, "Is the server available? Is my application available?" It's always available. 

I travel around visiting hundreds of customers every year and it's the same story. We don't have a problem. I was at a customer a couple weeks ago and they talked about that IBM i had been running for over a decade without any outage, until somebody was in the back room moving some wires around, a new electrician in the company, and they accidentally turned off the wrong switch. And then they had some outage. 

But it's human error that causes the problem. It's not the system itself, it's not the operating system or the hardware that's a problem. 

Going from POWER7 to POWER8, the big thing to me is it's not even necessarily the performance, it's the capability of virtualizing, more easily done through some of the different technologies that we have so it can spin up new environments more easily.

Today's world is more about the applications that we have. So, the challenge for the IBM i customer is staying up with time. We have to modernize. We've been talking about it for years - modernizing the applications - so that when my daughter or my son comes and works for you, they're working on a browser type interface. They're not using a green screen interface. That's probably the biggest challenge for IBM i customers. 

To a certain extent that's probably true in AIX too. We don't have enough of the web user, graphical-type interfaces that are on this platform that keep people around because they think green screen, they think old. Reality is, they might be running a green screen but the infrastructure behind it is POWER8, running SAN storage, SSD, flash technology. It's probably virtualized and they don't even realize it. But it's quite a powerful system and quite a highly modernized system in the background.

Linux on POWER is another good opportunity for customers because all of a sudden you wake up one day and you have 500 Intel-based Linux servers in your datacenter and if only you would have known that you could have invested in one POWER server, or two POWER servers, and scale that down to only a few instances of Linux on POWER. Think about the power. To me it's just simple math. Whenever you have 2,000 or 500 or 300 servers trying to manage a business, there's just more that's going to go wrong. And so if you can scale up with the Linux on POWER, that's the way to go.

Regarding the OpenPOWER Foundation, at first I was kind of skeptical. I thought, "Okay, well what does that mean to an IBM i customer or an AIX customer?" But what it means is that IBM is spending an enormous amount of time working on technology that's going to take us and make things like artificial intelligence, and the Watson, and all those things a little more commonplace. 

And for all organizations, we all have more information than what we know what to do with. If we can better harvest that and predict our customers' trends and purchases, were going to be so much farther ahead than the competition. And if you're doing it on IBM i you'll be able to do that with a fairly small cost of ownership, to get into some really big super-computer type technology to do that. 

So the open source thing as part of that brings on some new players that are helping IBM to invest. Obviously IBM is a business and if they're buying up POWER9, and if I have to wait for a POWER9 processor because some large open-source type consortium partner is buying that POWER9 technology, that's good for IMB i and AIX customers because it makes the POWER server itself a very viable economic decision for IBM too.

It's unfortunate, market wise, POWER is not known as well. But the total cost of ownership, IBM's done a great job of lowering the price to entry and then the scalability, security, and reliability. I mean it's second to none in the IT world.

Flexibility and reliability are the two features that are probably the most important to us.

We get better performance out of our applications, out of our databases running on Power, than we would on anything else that we have looked at.

I think they could use a little more work in the upgrading of the OS, how that could happen as non-interrupting, but I think they are working on that.

Scalability is awesome because we can move from POWER8 to POWER9 when the new servers come out. It allows us to scale out, add new servers underneath it, buy new equipment and add it into the datacenter.

It was pretty straightforward. The partition mobility helps a lot.

We do see a return on that investment, especially on the software licensing, when we are licensing DB2 or we are licensing WebSphere. We have seen that we have had to license fewer cores on the POWER8 than we had on the POWER7.

We've been using more of the mid-range systems than some of the bigger models, and we like that price point. We like where we are at there. It allows us to scale out the datacenter faster. It also allows us to react to a company or an application that's growing faster than someone else.

No. We were an HPE shop and we converted over to Power at POWER5. We thought the Power roadmap was just better, better suited for us.

Using the Power system gives us a leg up. It helps us keep up with the competition.

What we like the best about the POWER8 is that it scaled down in size and power usage. When we were buying POWER5, we had to buy a 16U rack to get 16 cores and maybe a half terabyte of memory. Now I can buy one 4U box with 16 cores and put a terabyte of memory in it, and I'm in business.

We have now started thinking about moving to Linux on Power. We are just starting to scratch that surface.

The ongoing work that is being done behind the scenes, that keep improving the product, logical partition mobility, PowerVM, PowerAIX. I think that all of those help contribute to the way Power is running.

I do consider IBM to be a market leader and in order to remain a market leader they just need to keep improving. Keep improving the product, keep pushing the product. I think it looks great.

We use it to run our current infrastructure and its core and resource planning applications.

The uptime feature is great, and their availability is very high. Since we have been using it, we have not experienced any downtime.

We have been using this solution for more than ten years and are using the Power8 version. It is deployed on-premises.

It is stable, and it has 100% uptime.

It is scalable, and we have a process on demand. Whenever we need additional resources, we pay for the activation. We have close to 10,000 users, and we do not have any plans to increase our users.

The technical support is a direct line, and they are responsive.

We found IBM to be more robust and able to meet our use cases.

The initial setup took us time because we migrated from a legacy to a power system. The migration took us about one week. The OEM IBM provided the consultant that did the installation.

The solution is quite expensive, and deploying it was also expensive. The pricing could be lower.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The threading, the portability through LPM, the ability for it to easily migrate between the environments, and the power of the chip. The flexibility of the chip, we found pretty nice.

We have the ability to fairly dynamically add resources to the servers, to the LPARS, as we need them; I don't know that other systems have that flexibility. At least from what I've seen.

It would be the efficiency of the chip, the ability to handle a phenomenal amount of load for not a lot of money. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to.

What I'd like to see would be more of a usage-based licensing model. COD got close, but you still have to buy the basic things, and you can't turn them off really well. Then they came out with being able to use it for 30 days. After that, you might as well just buy the processor.

It would be nice to each month go through and say, "Okay. This is what we're using," pay for it, true up, and be much more like that cloud-ish type thing with an on-prem. With all the benefits of being on-prem.

Excellent. They're usually knowledgeable.

I inherited it. We use it because it's been performing well. In our world, we essentially have POWER systems or Intel-based applications, and we generally find the compute and the processing power, and the ability to handle the load, is far better on the POWER systems.

In terms of upgrades, we've gone through multiple iterations. It was complex, but it was intuitive. We have an AIX team. They were able to upgrade the environment. Stand up the new environment. We were able to use LPM to migrate the load over from the old POWER7 to POWER8. It worked pretty well.

We don't really measure because we lease the system, so we have a natural opportunity. I would expect that if we went back and we tracked the performance per dollar spent, we would see a return on investment improvement.

We have two POWER E850s and one E870. Most of our transactional systems, engineering, they're mostly out-of-the-box applications. PeopleSoft, Siebel, engineering applications.

I consider IBM to be a market leader in the server sector. They need to keep creating a price-effective system that competes with commodity hardware, which I believe they've done so far.

The hardware keeps getting better. We're hoping for a POWER9 announcement here so we can try to roadmap what we're going to buy next.

The backups work great, data recovery works great, and as far as customer innovations, they can connect to us, we can get them what they need, and it gives us the tools to give them what they need.

POWER8 was a huge upgrade. I think we had POWER6s before, and just the I/O and getting the information we need faster to the customers. We had a little saying of "one click, two seconds," get them what they needed, and POWER8 helped us get there to provide that for them.

We're in the insurance industry and we actually moved up in our market share because of it. We started being able to make remote apps that our customers could get to. Then call on that backbone, of that system, and enter information, upload it to us, those types of things, all tied in, that we probably couldn't have done with the POWER6

That's why we came to the IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage Technical University conference, to see what's coming next, to see what we can maybe take advantage of.

Speed. Everyone likes speed. Not that speed has been an issue up until now but you can never be too fast.

I know we have some Windows stuff in-house and I know they have some data deduplication, so I want look at and see some of this newer stuff; we'll take advantage of that. It's something we'd like to see in POWER8. I know some people save stuff in two spots, and then it's four spots, and then it's in 400 spots. And how do you clean that up?

I've been there ten years and they've been using it since before I started.

No issues.

Absolutely none. No issues. I think we added some hard drive space. I was scared at first because I didn't know - I came from a Windows side of the world - thinking, "This is going to be end of days," and it was a none issue. It was really easy.

They're great. They answer the phone, they call me back. Sometimes I get busy and forget to email them back, and they remind me, "Hey, are you still having problems? We're here, whatever you need." And, they're pretty fast, pretty responsive.

The DB2 for the database is our backbone of our system, we run off that for everything, so that's what brought us to POWER. Our web servers point to it, our mapping servers point to it for mapping solutions. Everything points to that and it's what we run off of.

The upgrade from POWER6 was really, really simple. We upgraded the operating system and just did a backup and a restore, or a backup off the old hardware, restore onto the new.

I don't get to look at most of that. It's kind of above my pay scale, but from my understanding, from what I've heard through the grapevine, ROI is there.

We have the POWER8 boxes currently, we have four of them with IBM i OS installed. We currently have two sites and they kind of mirror each other, and then we also use the IBM's Lotus Domino installation for our email.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because no one's perfect; and it's not free. But you also get what you pay for.

I consider IBM a market leader for servers, absolutely, hands down. For our business, we'll probably never not have an IBM box in-house. And I know we just keep doing more and more with it. They keep putting more and more features into it, more stuff for us to take advantage of. I don't know why we would go elsewhere.

We use it to run our important systems and applications.

I think the performance is good.

I think the cost should be cheaper.

I've been using this solution for more than five years.

We've been using it for a long time, and it's stable.

It is scalable. We have about 1000 users.

There is a yearly licensing cost, and it's an expensive solution.

I recommend IBM Power Systems to those who are interested in having the hardware. I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.