IBM Power Systems Reviews

The performance, the resiliency, and in the capacity that IBM provides the customer, that you can support old versions like, for example, AIX 5.3/ 6.1 in the new versions.

In our case we are a business partner, we sell solutions. But I think what our customers appreciate most is that they can save space, since Power is high performance. You can have fewer machines, fewer servers and good performance in your environment.

Since the cloud is so in demand right now, there is a feature that VMware has which is vMotion. I would like this with PowerVC, NovaLink, PowerVM. I would like IBM to improve that feature so that we can sell it to our customers and improve their satisfaction.

IBM is definitely a market leader in servers but to maintain that position it needs to improve how the information gets to the customer. Sometimes IBM is very good at doing new things but nobody knows about it.

We have been using Power since before it was named Power, RS/6000 and the like. We've worked with POWER more than 10 years.

We had issues, but not so big. Most of the time they have been simple things, performance, microcode updates and things like that; but never a big issue that I can recall.

I think scalability is wonderful because you can get start with a small machine and you can grow as you want.

In our regions it's Argentina that provides the service to us. It's very good. They always help us.

It's straightforward, it is very simple.

When it comes to upgrading from POWER7 to 8, or other upgrades, there can be a return on investment because you can use some parts of a POWER7 machine and build them in to a new POWER8 and I think it's a cost savings for our customers.

I don't know too much about licensing or prices or the like, even though I get involved in the configuration, presales and that kind of thing. I am just hoping to see what is coming with POWER9.

We haven't considered any competitors at the moment, but we do have competition back there in my country, of course. We chose IBM because of its performance, resiliency and the capacity you have to make LPARs. It's very good.

We have POWER8, POWER7, we still have some POWER6 and some POWER5. We're using it for AIX.

• 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.

Faster. We use JDE 9.1, and from the time that we started using the POWER8 hardware and processors, we could see a big difference in the processing for the JDE 9.1.

From an IT perspective, on my side of the systems, we don't have the JDE CNC team down on us all the time trying to blame everything on the system running too slow. Now they can't blame it on us because everything's so fast, they're just amazed by it.

We're in oil and gas and I think, right now, we're on the top of our competitors with the systems that we've had. From some of the other companies I've talked to, they're still using old IBM systems or they've gone to other platforms.

The CPU. It could always get faster. Pricing's always an issue - with every company; it could always be better.

A year and a half, roundabout.

On a scale of one to 10 - I've been doing this for 30 year's - I'd give it a ten, being the best. They're always there. They're always available. When the other platforms are going down, and they're working on them all the time, mine's always up. When the other platforms are having security issues, no one's getting into mine.

Very good. Sometimes.

I have one thing that I have a problem with, it's when they outsourced everything to India. I would rather have gum surgery than get on the phone and talk to somebody to try to put me with a technical consultant. Whenever I do get someone who picks up the phone here in the USA, I think, "This is going to go quick." It just never does when I get someone else, and my colleagues feel the same way.

We were using the POWER7 and moved up to the POWER8, because our contract was running out and we got a pretty good deal to move up to POWER8 hardware.

It was complex. We had IBM lab services come do it for us rather than our business partner, and it went well.

We see a return on investment from the move to POWER8.

Only IBM, for now.

We're using POWER8 with IBM i.

It let's me work more efficiently. Keeps me around a lot longer.

I consider IBM to be market leader in servers. To remain a market leader in the servers sector they need to keep doing what they're doing. I think they're going in the right direction.

IBM Power Systems is used for data centers for CVS, activation, and databases.

Power Systems' best features are that it's reliable, stable, and easily available. It's also really scalable and can be virtualized without third-party software support. Power Systems has its own PowerVM where you can make VMs and have multiple systems in the same server, which benefits customers in terms of licensing.

The price is a bit high and could be improved.

I've been working with Power Systems since 2012.

PowerSystems is very reliable, it has very little downtime, so we don't have to worry about it going down or performing badly.

Power Systems is really scalable.

The initial setup is very straightforward - we migrated one bank in three days. The software is also 100% record compatible, so we don't have to think about compatibility and worry that older things won't work.

Power Systems is a bit more costly than other products in the market, but in terms of ROI and the longevity, performance, and reliability that Power Systems provides, it's worth it in the long run. 

PowerSystems is better than all other systems in the market, and I would recommend it to anybody whose application does not have a dependency in the operating system and machine. I would rate PowerSystems as ten out of ten.

IBM Power Systems is used for the core banking applications. We have accounts with financial enterprises in Egypt. We propose this solution if you are a bank, you are upgrading or migrating bank applications from Oracle or other vendors, and you would like to have a stable platform in terms of hardware and software.

We value the stability and technology capability of this solution the most. It is very stable, and the processor technology of IBM is very good. When you have a CIO and you are dealing with C-level every day, you can, without any doubt, support the core banking or critical applications with this solution. 

Its management can be made easier because it is not easy to manage. They should also find a new way for migrating from an old Power Systems to a new one. The migration process is currently very complicated.

It should be made easier to scale. Currently, its scalability depends on the initial sizing, whereas in Nutanix HCI, you can add whatever you need and whenever you need it.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is a very stable platform in terms of hardware and software.

Scalability is there, but it depends on the initial sizing. You need to plan for scalability from the beginning because it depends on the series of our systems, processors, and the number of processors that have been activated during the implementation. So, it depends on the sizing, whereas with Nutanix HCI, you can add whatever you need and whenever you need it.

It is usually focused on enterprise customers. In our company, we have around 20 to 25 users. We plan to increase its usage.

I don't contact their support team, but based on the experience of our team, they are usually supportive. Our team doesn't seem to have any issue with IBM technical support. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

I am into sales, and I don't implement Power Systems. Based on the experience of our technical team, the initial set up usually goes smoothly. The issue comes only while migrating from the old one to the new one. For the whole migration, which included the initial setup and testing, it took at least six months.

We upgraded Power Systems from version 7 to version 9, and we worked with the IBM team during the implementation phase. We successfully completed its implementation with their help.

Its price depends on the sizing.

We evaluate Oracle Exadata or Nutanix HCI. For a huge sizing, we go for Power Systems. For a small sizing, we can use an Intel-based solution. Nowadays, some of the core banking applications are moving to the Intel platform, and that's why we are recommending Intel-based solutions, but IBM Power Systems is still a number one solution. It is our preferred platform for core banking applications.

Before starting the implementation, I would advise others to take enough time in planning its implementation, especially the sizing.

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

We like the virtualization, PowerVM, the live partition mobility, and dynamically adding the processors and the memory. Also AIX. The beauty of AIX is really something to be admired. AIX is a very useful operating system. The volume management is really good.

I have been using POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, and then we transferred onto POWER8. We really have reduced our billing cycles from days to hours. 

Secondly, it is really good for billing jobs. It is reducing our time. We used to do billing in multiple days, now have reduced it to hours. That's great.

The HMC and PowerVM need a more catchy graphical interface. 

Secondly, the command line interfaces should be converted into graphical interfaces. It is such a complex thing in making LPARs when you are using it through a wire server. It should be easy rather than be complicated. I'll give an example of the graphical interface. The V7000 is really great. Anyone can use it, there's no complexity in there. PowerVM and the VIOS interfaces should be like the V7000.

Every two years we have to buy a new server. It is kind of complex, because we have to compare it with Oracle servers. We have to do RFPs. We have to service both the servers, both the technologies, and then everything goes under pricing.

We continuously engage with IBM for different service requests. 

It's good. There are a few different kinds of support available in our area, Premium Services and the Remote Services. We usually use the Remote Services. We just open a ticket and give them the logs and they give us a solution.

They are helpful.

No. We are already invested in IBM, so we won't go towards anything else. We have lots of investment in IBM equipment. We are certified with IBM equipment as well as for hardware and software support by IBM.

We have been using IBM the last 15 years or so, and the performance that IBM servers are giving us is really good. Secondly, in our geographical area, it's the support. IBM has got good support. And the workloads we do have in our environment, IBM has got the equipment which can handle those workloads.

Regarding upgrades it's a tricky game. It's a complex thing, because in our environment when something is running smoothly we don't want to stop it or give it downtime. We try to keep it running as long as we can. So in this way we sometime miss the upgrades, we don't upgrade it. But we are now focusing on the upgrades in a timely manner, rather than waiting for years and years. We are working on that.

My rating of nine out of 10 is for the hardware. However, the software still has lots of issues. For example, we need to upgrade the software very frequently, so I'd give it seven out of 10.

In Pakistan, IBM is a market leader, and to maintain that position the main thing is support. If the support guys are good - the people who are managing the accounts for enterprise organizations - are good they are very much in contact with the organization, keeping it informed about the new technologies and the new offerings. These certainly can help in keeping IBM's position right now in the server industry.

I would say the converged feature. You can have all of your storage, your processing, your database, everything in the one platform, and all under IBM. That's the best part of it. 

It has helped them improve in a lot of ways. It has improved their efficiency as well as their scalability, from a growth perspective. They want to add more servers, more processing power, things like that. They can be much more easily done now.

I would say that in general we would prefer it if the software was more transparent, in terms of how you are using it. 

Right now it depends on the level of the system and how much more you might have to pay for the same software. And being a cloud provider, we get into a lot of situations where our customers might need just a fraction of a processor, but they still have to pay for a bigger portion of the software costs.

We have been providing this for the last 15 years.

Upgrading from POWER7 to POWER8 was not a big deal. It was pretty straightforward, I would say. Going from version 5.4 to a 6, that was more of a challenge, but now it is pretty stable. We have some partitions running 7.3, some running 7.2 version. All over the map.

Scalability is great. With the VIOS, the Power and the Power platform, we can virtualize. We can create many more LPARs.

It is definitely a more flexible solution, compared to earlier versions. You want to be able to cater to multiple customers on one particular system. We have dozens of systems running in our environment right now.

Back in the day, it used to be more hardware-centric. Now, with the software version, it is much easier for us to create multiple partitions. We may run a POWER8 system with 20 cores, and we could have, maybe, 30 customers on that one box by slicing and dicing it. So it is pretty good, from that perspective.

We are the service provider and so we have the IBM i at every level in the cloud. This is pretty much due to the demand from the customers. It's not us, it's really our customers asking for it.

We also work with other solutions. We do everything; we do Windows, Linux, AIX, as well as IBM i. All different platforms. 

Compared to Intel, Power is a much more stable solution. Security is also much better. Compared to the other platforms, Power definitely has more capabilities.

There are not many companies in the US who can provide the IBM i platform in the cloud so we are uniquely positioned in being able to cater to that particular requirement of our customers.

I would consider IBM to be a market leader from the Power side, but not in other areas. I think they were getting there but they made a big mistake by selling the PureFlex to Lenovo.

• The Live Partition Mobility (LPM) feature.
• The virtualization feature.

Depending on the simplified remote restart for the DR, that's what we're looking forward to.

It has improved the stability of the Oracle database. We have a big database running in a Power environment and it is more stable than compared to what we are adding.

I would say the cost. They need to work on the cost because I think it's quite expensive and that's a changing trend in the industry, to be more focused on the product.

I started using Power when I started at T-Mobile three years ago. They had POWER5, and we migrated them to POWER6. So it has been about three years, maybe a little longer.

For the scalability, we do have the capacity planning and we do plan accordingly and I think we would go for POWER9 if we had to, depending on the usage. I think there is still scalability room for us.

I think T-Mobile has a big shop of Intel for Linux servers and they have Power for AIX servers.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup because we have an SME who does that and I'm just an engineer at the back end. I do the operations support, so that's where I come into the picture.

We do see ROI from the move from POWER7 to POWER8. We do capacity management and we are able to move quite a lot of workload.

Would I prefer a license based on a cloud system?

We have Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and that's more for the application side. I haven't dug into this more to check how the database would do on the cloud so I'm not sure about that.

We are using AIX with POWER8 but we do have a mix of POWER7 servers as well. 

We do capacity planning, and we try to maintain the Power capacity monitoring and to maintain that we've got enough capacity for a year worth of workload. We plan ahead as well for the coming workload. What we've got is enough for one more year.