IBM Power Systems Reviews

We primarily use the solution for running an ERP. Use cases can go from very small to very big. I'm talking about a hardware device, and therefore it can run all kinds of different software. The virtualization is outstanding. It can go from very, very small to very, very big. We personally use it so that we can use multi-tenancy. 

I can have multiple clients on one server and I can cut it up into tiny pieces. Where a customer would normally have to buy, let's say, one solution for a hundred thousand dollars, instead, they can share that a hundred thousand dollars with five other customers as one customer doesn't actually need a complete server. Clients can share it for cost reasons. 

It's very secure.

I can have what they call multi-tenancy, meaning that I can have multiple tenants within the same server.

The reliability of the solution has been excellent.

The solution is stable.

Technical support is exceptional.

The scalability is very, very good.

I've worked with the solution for a very long time, and therefore, when it comes to the things that it doesn't support, I've accepted that and I understand why they won't. If you asked me what I'd like added, I'd say that it'd be nice if they ran GPUs, however, I know that's not the direction they're going. That said, I would appreciate it if they offered GPU support. 

It used to have it and they pulled it out. That's something that's missing from it, however, there are workarounds.

I've been working with this product for 35 years.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. the security is excellent and the performance is good.

I literally have customers that have a server like this in a cupboard and they don't even know where their server is as it just keeps running.

The scalability on offer is excellent. It's very easy to scale and works well for small to large organizations. 

Technical support is excellent. We have been very happy with the level of service we get. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not complex. A company shouldn't have any issues with the implementation. 

In terms of maintenance, we have a large staff, however, that's necessary due to the fact that we support so many clients. You need an administrator and it depends on how many clients you have, how many administrators you need. For a lot of our clients, we sell them one of these servers, and then we do all the work for them. We install it and then we do the administration. You need the appropriate administrators when you have this product. Small clients may need one administrator, whereas larger ones might need three or four.

We also work with Lenovo.

We are a reseller of IBM and Lenovo equipment. We are on the infrastructure side, mostly on the hardware side.

We sell systems to clients, however, we also have a cloud environment that we sell to clients using that equipment. We always say to customers, we sell what to them what we use ourselves.

We use versions seven to ten.

There are a lot of well-kept secrets to this product that a lot of people are not aware of and do not leverage all of the features that are available on the system. Therefore, if a company is looking to implement this solution, it should do some research. Go to user groups to speak to other users to find out about those well-kept secrets, free of charge.

I'd rate the solution a perfect ten out of ten. It's outstanding. It's so reliable. I have customers that run it that never touch it. It runs for 20 years by itself in a closet. It runs their entire business. 

The new thing which we have brought is LPM. Although it was available with POWER7 as well, but that does help us out a lot.

Honestly, the customer is always happy if he gets good performance.

I would like to have some stats where the CPU is getting utilized and to see how much of the actual CPU I'm using. It's like hypervisor stats which I should be getting.

Also, if I could get a similar thing on a cloud, so I could switch from cloud to datacenter, datacenter to cloud. It should have that flexibility somewhere.

About three years.

No, we've never had any issue in terms of stability. It's always better. We don't see unexpected outages. So, that's the best thing.

It's good. We normally have them for problems with the hard drive, and for the software it is also fine.

Some of our colleagues that attended the conferences, they were excited about the new features, that's the reason we brought the POWER8 into our system.

I don't think we know IBM initial setup because we have some colleagues working for a long time and they have much experience with this kind of set up.

It was straightforward.

We have done testing with Intel, we have done testing with POWER, and the performance we were getting with POWER is actually very good compared to what we were getting on the other systems. So that's the actual background.

Majorly, what we have is on POWER8. We have POWER systems, we others for development and testing, environment hosted, but all the production is majorly on POWER8.

Currently, I see IBM as a market leader in the server sector. And I see, there are a lot of other options that are coming, such as cloud-based, AWS and the like. We are people who like to test and see if we keep the same thing for a longer period on the market.

To continue to be a market leader, I personally think IBM should be on the cloud, more in the cloud space. That is something that they should do much faster now.

I'm not sure of the actual term, but being able to delegate and take back the chips, and DB2. DB2 is a must.

We're able to streamline and clone our systems. All of our systems on the floor do the exact same thing, and that works for us.

Not sure. Everything works great.

IBM does a great job of incorporating the latest technology, but it's hard to give IT a 10 out of 10, we're always growing and fluctuating. 

None at all. (Then again, we keep developers off our systems). 

No issues. Unlimited growth with Power.

We have CE's and they're awesome. Scale of one to 10, they're tens.

We've had Compaq, we've had Solaris, we have Dell for our workstations, but IBM for our "big iron." It does what it's supposed to do, better, faster, and more efficiently. We also chose IBM for the support and the products.

Very straightforward. The field engineers usually come in and place the hardware on the floor and install it, and we take it from there. 

Compared to what we've dealt with, with Sun Solaris/Oracle and Compaq, the cost model is great.

In terms of the upgrade from previous systems to POWER8, we've seen a return on investment. We're able to do more with less. We're actually using fewer engineers to do it. I'm kind of skeptical that we could do even more with even fewer engineers, but yes, it can always be improved.

We have the whole scope of hardware, and we're running AIX 7.2. We have POWER7, POWER8. We actually still have some POWER5 on the floor. 

Power uniquely positions our company in the industry because of the unlimited growth.

I consider IBM to be the market leader in servers. They just need to keep doing what they're doing.

We have a problem with the storage software. The media to restore data is also not found. 

I have been working with the product for about five years. 

The product is stable. 

The tool is not scalable and my company has around 5000 users for it. 

We use HPE and Dell servers. We have found that IBM Power Systems require low maintenance compared to others. 

The solution does not require any maintenance. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. The solution is very stable and has no headaches related to maintenance. It is suited for large enterprises. 

Primarily the reliability. I can set up a system and it runs until we decide to get rid of it.

The reliability is one. We have a lot of extra redundancy built into Power and we run our critical applications on there so it protects our brand and our business.

Since POWER4.

We are very happy with the performance.

No, we have not.

It's very good. They are knowledgeable and there is always a point of contact.

POWER8 definitely handles the workload better than POWER7 did, as far as the threading between having a lot of partitions running in a system. There is less impact when the system doesn't bog down, when a lot of applications are running.

Licensing is not an issue but it is something that we are being asked for from our leadership. Because usage fluctuates all the time, they want to know that they are only paying for what they are using. And we're all competing against the cloud vendors now.

No. We have been running on Power ever since we went to SAP.

I am using POWER8 for AIX and Linux.

I wouldn't say that Power uniquely positions our company in the industry. We run all of our internal applications on it and we keep our business running with it.

As far as IBM being a market leader, I would think that they are certainly one of the players, I don't know if they are the leader or not. In order to be a market leader I think IBM would have to get into more shops and get the word out there. It's kind of like the Windows mentality, a lot people go with what they know or what they see advertised.

Speaking from the IBM i perspective, it's a very well-integrated database, a well-designed power system. Plus, the Power gives us the performance that we need at a low cost.

I think we are able to run our entire organization on a smaller machine than if we had multiple Intel servers. The software that's available for the Power Systems also gives us our industry edge. 

It does everything that we require though we would like it to be faster.

I would also like to see a small developer model come out that I could purchase on my own to develop application software.

Probably six years. 

We are using POWER7 with IBM i to run our enterprise applications. We have been thinking of upgrading to POWER8, but at this point we are going to wait and just update to the POWER9.

No.

It's definitely scalable. You can go from a small model all the way up to as large as you need to go.

For the most part it's good, when you can get to second-level support. Usually, when you call first-level you get somebody in India who doesn't always know what they're talking about. So generally, you have to escalate it to second-level to get a good response.

We had maxed out our earlier versions, and when we moved to a POWER7 we saw a definite performance increase. It was able to take care of some of the bottlenecks that we were experiencing. In terms of power usage and space it's been great as well.

No, we are staying with the IBM Power Systems. 

I definitely view IBM as a market leader. I think where they fall down is in their marketing, getting their message out to other people. Because not too many people are aware of how great a system the Power is. You've got a lot of competition in the Intel world that somehow seems to get more marketing out there. 

I am unsure of what the primary use case of this solution was, as my role was only related to deploying the solution.

I am unsure what features I found most valuable because I didn't use the power system deployment for the clients.

Unfortunately, I don't have any thoughts now on what could be improved.

We have used this solution for approximately six months. However, I am unsure if it is currently the latest version because we deployed the solution on-premises as vendors.

The solution is scalable.

We have had a good experience with the technical support team at IBM.

I would classify the initial setup as medium. It took approximately one day to deploy IBM power systems. Everyone on the team had their role, so I can't speak about what each person did.

I am unsure if the clients have seen a return on investment.

I am unfamiliar with the licensing costs.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. However, there are improvements that can be made on the technical side.

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.