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.

IBM Power Systems provides very good performance and stability compared to other brands or processors.

IBM should provide a platform where users can learn about the storage and security of IBM Power Systems.

We have had some minor issues with IBM's technical support. However, IBM support is good overall.

I have previously used Intel and Oracle Solaris servers. The performance of IBM Power Systems is very good compared to Intel. IBM Power Systems provides more stability compared to Intel. You have firmware and malware issues with Intel, but IBM Power Systems has no security issues.

You must consolidate and consider with other stakeholders regarding implementing IBM Power Systems.

The solution's pricing is very, very high compared to other platforms.

You can use IBM Power Systems instead of other brands if you want something with a critical application.

Overall, I rate IBM Power Systems a nine out of ten.

The solution's most valuable features are speed and capacity on demand. It works faster than Intel Power Processor.

They should improve the solution's pricing. Also, they should provide proper documentation to understand the setup process.

I have been using the solution for more than two years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a very scalable solution as it has capacity on demand. We can activate many features depending on the business requirements.

The solution’s technical support team is good.

I have worked with Lenovo Server, HP Server, Dell Server, and SolarWinds earlier.

The solution’s initial setup was complex.

The solution's native server is not much expensive. But, the additional software required for visualization and data protection is highly-priced.

The solution is suitable for prevention and maintenance. If you have the budget and a knowledgeable executive to manage the system, you should buy IBM Power Systems. I rate it a nine out of ten for its availability and visibility.

I primarily use Power Systems for high availability and security.

Power Systems' best features include its user-friendliness and self-checking/self-healing abilities. It's also the best solution for MIMIX and high availability.

Power Systems' price could always be lower.

I've been working with Power Systems for over thirty years.

Power Systems is totally stable.

Power Systems is very scalable.

IBM's tech support is one of Power Systems' best features.

The initial setup is very easy - you just power it on, and it's ready to work in an hour.

Power Systems is very cheap and provides good value for money.

I would 100% recommend Power Systems to other users and would rate it ten out of ten.

We've been very satisfied with the solution's capabilities. 

The installation is easy.

It's very stable. There is less downtime.

The product can scale. 

The compatibility with other products could be better. They have a proprietary package to install on the server. With the application or the database, you can install on top of it.

Some competitors may have more features or a certain advantage over this product.

The solution is quite expensive.

We'd like the solution to have a cloud base. Most of it is on-premises.

I've used the solution for almost ten years.

It's very stable. They have a different Hypervisor compared to an Intel-based Hypervisor, like VMware or Red Hat. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is like an embedded Hypervisor, so you don't have to rest up the server. If you ever install the packets or any update, it does not require you to rest up the server. It's more stable, and you don't need more downtime.

Maybe the entry level is not very scalable. However, if you are using the enterprise level, like Power E-series, the enterprise series, not the entry-level, it's very scalable. Within the core or maybe the memory, and also the IO, it's very scalable.

In Indonesia, they have local support, however, maybe for certain products, the support is just not as good as the main product, like the Power System or Storage. Maybe for another product, the support is very limited.

We worked with IBM products, among others. 

The installation is very simple. 

From the installer, you install the machine. Maybe you want to install the operating system. It's quite different from Windows or Linux since this is Unix-based.

Compared to Intel, IBM Power Systems is more expensive compared to Intel. Still, if you compare the TCO or the license that you can save using IBM Power, the pricing is almost the same with the Intel base, however, it depends on the application license or the database license. 

In general, the pricing is quite high.

I manage the product at the company. I'm a consultant. We deal mostly with enterprise-level organizations. I'm an IBM partner.

If a company wants to implement the IBM System, maybe it has to check the compatibility of the apps and the DB. Also, if they want to implement the TCO, they have to check the TCO compared to the Intel base. Sometimes, they are only checking the base hardware installation. If they implement the DB or the apps, the pricing may be reduced since the core in Power System is more powerful than the Intel base.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for IBM Power Systems is Oracle Databases.

The main feature that I have found most valuable is PowerVM - its virtualization feature which is the most powerful.

With the new POWER9, and even with the POWER8, processor, IBM has incorporated Linux compatibility into its platform. All its new developments on this platform are great. I really don't see anything at the moment which would be improving the platform. I'm totally grateful for the possibility of using Linux and AIX in the same hardware.

In the next release, I would like to see additional graphical dashboards to help the administrators access information more easily.

I have been using IBM Power Systems for five years. I work in a company selling IBM Power Solutions. I've been selling Power solutions for the last 10 years. We are IBM's partner in Bolivia.

I'm totally satisfied with the solution. It helps the IT team especially so they can work quite confidently.

IBM Power Systems' platform scales with the different types of equipment so you start using a little hardware, but not as little as it might sound because it is a very powerful platform, for the little servers. So you can grow up and scale out. You can scale up quite easily with the IBM Power Systems.

We have between 800 to 1,000 users. All of them have access to the apps that use the database.

In terms of staff required for deployment or maintenance, there are six guys who are database administrators and operating system administrators.

Right now we do not have plans to increase the usage, maybe in the future.

We needed to use IBM support just a couple of times and the onset time was quite comfortable so I can say I'm comfortable with quality of service support from IBM.

The initial setup is not complex. It's not quite easy, but with the service support it's quite easy.

With AIX it takes between two and six hours to prepare the platform for a new environment for the production stage and once the initial environment has been set up it is quite easy because you can replicate it or modify it according to your new requirements.

We have our own service team in our company so we didn't use external services.

We bought the license for a three year period. We always buy hardware with a three-year support and maintenance fee. It's just the standard fee.

To anyone considering it, I would say that the IBM Power platform is so secure and stable.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give IBM Power Systems an eight.

The use case is for hosting a lot of the bank's applications.

Some of the most valuable features are the processing power, stability, and security.

I would like to see the scaling model improved so it's not just either tiny or huge.

We have been using IBM Power Systems since 2001, so it's been 20 years.

IBM is quite stable. That's one of their most popular aspects. We just upgraded our power systems recently, so we're going to be working with them through the next five years at least.

The solution is being used quite heavily.

The scalability is a bit above average. It's not the best, but it's a good deal.

The SKU modeling part they have is not very flexible toward customers. Either you have to go very big or you have to go very small. There isn't an in-between. There's not a lot of variety in this.

I have onsite support and I talk to technical support a lot. My experience has been good.

Setup was straightforward, with the help of the professional services from IBM. Maintenance is handled by the IBM team, especially the hardware.

We used IBM partners. Usually it's IBM themselves, not the partners.

The licensing costs are okay. With IBM Power Systems, it's inclusive, so you can differentiate the price of the hardware from the software itself. The power systems are quite expensive. In the end, you equate a means of value. From a value proposition, it is either justifiable or not.

The additional costs are the maintenance and warranty professional services.

Compared to similar solutions, IBM Power Systems has a proven record. They have their own reputation. You have the availability of technical expertise in the market. They're quite compatible with most of the solutions that we work with.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

My advice for an organization that is looking to implement this solution is that they should have the adequate expertise of personnel that can run the system. They should study their TCO and ROI regarding whether it is worth investing in this, given that it's a very expensive solution. These are the two most important aspects.

I would also advise dealing with an appropriate partner or dealing with IBM directly.

When it comes to reliability, availability and profitability, nothing can beat IBM Power Systems. The machine has great availability and is very serviceable. One can do so many things while the machine is up and running. There is no need to shut anything down. This is how we have been conducting our business for the past few years. 

There are several features which I feel should be added to the solution, including those concerning the graphic processors. 

I am referring to the GPU based machines involved in machine learning. The new systems focus on the part involved in experiencing, but not on machine learning. The product should come with a comprehensive portfolio which will address all the high performance computing requirements, in additiona to machine and deep learning. This is an issue which I raised with IBM. 

Software testing and the compatibility of software products that are available in the market should be addressed. This is an issue we sometimes face, as this particular product is not tested, certified and available in Power Systems. We have lost deals over this. 

The price of the solution could be somewhat better and this is what lowers my rating of it to a seven or eight out of ten. We directly compete with Intel-based products, which several vendors make available, and a price improvement would certainly give us an advantage over the competition. 

I have been using IBM Power Systems for more than 10 years.

I rate the solution as a seven or eight out of ten for its price. As we are talking about a very competitive market, the pricing could be a bit better. This would give us a definite edge over the competition, as we find ourselves in direct competition with Intel-based products, which are available from a number of vendors. 

This system is ideal when it comes to performance and reliability. I don't see any need for improving on its current features and functionality. 

We are resellers of IBM FlashSystem. 

Owing to the issues with its pricing, I rate IBM Power Systems as a seven or eight out of ten.