What is most valuable?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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
What needs improvement?
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?
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been there ten years and they've been using it since before I started.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.