HPE Apollo Systems vs IBM Power Systems comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM are both solutions in the Rack Servers category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.0, while IBM is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.3. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 3.9% mindshare in Rack Servers, compared to IBM’s 7.2% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of IBM users who would recommend it.

HPE Apollo Systems

Read 24 HPE Apollo Systems reviews

1,962 Views
1,707 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

IBM Power Systems

Read 73 IBM Power Systems reviews

3,714 Views
3,714 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

HPE Apollo Systems

IBM Power Systems

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

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HPE Apollo Systems and IBM Power Systems compete in the high-performance computing market. IBM Power Systems appear to have the upper hand due to their advanced features that users feel justify the investment.

Features: HPE Apollo Systems are known for scalability, energy efficiency, and flexibility. IBM Power Systems are recognized for high processing power, reliability, and robust security features.

Room for Improvement: HPE Apollo Systems users suggest improvements in integration, software tools, and compatibility with existing systems. IBM Power Systems users desire lower costs, more accessible maintenance procedures, and improved affordability without losing performance.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE Apollo Systems are straightforward to deploy with comprehensive support. IBM Power Systems, despite more complex deployment, offer responsive technical support. HPE excels in faster initial deployment, while IBM provides detailed guidance for complex setups.

Pricing and ROI: HPE Apollo Systems have competitive setup costs and flexible pricing, offering favorable ROI aligned with budget-conscious decisions. IBM Power Systems, with higher upfront costs, promise long-term value and substantial returns, appealing to those prioritizing lasting investment.

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To learn more, read our detailed HPE Apollo Systems vs. IBM Power Systems Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems vs. IBM Power Systems

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

HPE Apollo Systems

Ranking in Rack Servers

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Density Optimized Servers (2nd)

IBM Power Systems

Ranking in Rack Servers

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Rack Servers category, the mindshare of HPE Apollo Systems is 3.9%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Power Systems is 7.2%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Rack Servers Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Power Systems	7.2%
HPE Apollo Systems	3.9%
Other	88.9%

Rack Servers

Featured Reviews

Gökhan DURMAZ

Account Manager at TD SYNNEX

High-quality integration and strong support have optimized our rack server operations

HPE Apollo Systems is a good product because it has better support and best quality with integrity. When I speak about integrity, I speak about GPU integration or other integrations such as GPU integration, backup software integration, and hypervisor integration. Regarding the integration of high-speed interconnectors in HPE Apollo Systems, they impact computational tasks because the high-speed interconnect affects performance. I don't remember the specifics. Regarding the cooling technologies, they help to reduce operational costs. The positive impact I see from HPE Apollo Systems is that support is good and quality is good. In general, HPE Apollo Systems appears to be for rack servers with some optimization capabilities.

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Foluso Jibowo

Product Manager at Hiperdist Ltd

Has empowered enterprises with secure and cost-effective solutions

When discussing disadvantages, I do not see many areas for improvement because we have received good testimonies from every client. IBM gives customers peace of mind. One challenge, which I would not really call a challenge, is that initially people have the notion that IBM Power Systems is quite expensive. However, IBM does not lose deals based on price. This is a message we need to keep communicating to people who feel that IBM is on the high side in terms of cost. We encourage them to have a discussion with us about their total cost of ownership over three or five years. There is a notion in the market that IBM is expensive, which is false. However, once we engage and show them their return on investments and their total cost of ownership savings, they tend to embrace IBM.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"HPE Apollo Systems is a good product because it has better support and best quality with integrity."

"When we moved to the Apollo and all flash drives, we gained a lot of performance."

"The technical support from HPE has always been good in my experience."

"It's pretty flexible. You can choose how much storage you put on the server. You can have one to three nodes, depending on whether you want more CPU or storage."

"It's going to meet our needs moving forward, it is scalable."

"We're going to buy another Apollo 6500. We may configure it with half the number of GPUs because that may be all we need. In a sense, we can see the Apollo 6500 being so powerful that we only need half the GPU capability that we have now."

"The solution is well documented in a data sheet."

"With HPE Apollo, we can propose configurations with many hard drives, making it suitable for large storage needs."

More HPE Apollo Systems pros

"From a reliability standpoint it has provided us with excellent performance."

"The installation is easy."

"We found working with IBM Power Systems that LPM is the most valuable feature."

"The performance and stability are great."

"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."

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

"Power Systems' best features include its user-friendliness and self-checking/self-healing abilities."

"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."

More IBM Power Systems pros

Cons

"If there could be some training for our team, we would be better equipped to promote and support HPE Apollo."

"The predictive analysis feature could be improved."

"One drawback which I had: When I needed to expand storage on the Apollo, I had significant problems getting disks for it. It was a very long wait-time. So, if I were to give any advice in regards to improving this product, I would say make more of the 8TB disks available quicker."

"We could, perhaps, use more GPUs in the future, go from eight to 16 GPUs per instance. That could run head-to-head against the DGX-1, the DGX-2 that NVIDIA has developed in their own chassis. That would be interesting to see."

"The solution's deployment, security, and scalability need improvement."

"We would like to see improved cooling because that is quite an issue. If you put that much compute power into a single rack, cooling really becomes an issue. And there is room for improvement there."

"We are quite happy with it, but its price and storage density can be better."

"HPE Apollo Systems is a bit expensive, and there are some issues with scalability."

More HPE Apollo Systems cons

"Power Systems' price could always be lower."

"Better manage heterogeneous footprints of all the different operating systems that are out there across one common interface."

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

"Initially when sizing it, people perceive IBM Power Systems as quite expensive."

"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."

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

"If you take advantage of some of these real advanced features, for oversubscribing as an example, it's not supported on Linux on Power. So that stops us, in particular, from going that way."

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

More IBM Power Systems cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Obviously I would like to see the cost go down. That speaks for itself."

"It is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. The standard licensing cost is for the GPU and the features that someone is using. There are additional charges but they depend on the solution."

"The price of the solution is more expensive than Dell which is their main competitor. However, there are times we have managed to receive a comparable price."

"Compared to other products, HPE Apollo is not an expensive solution."

"There is an annual license required to use HPE Apollo."

"Its price depends on the sizing."

"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."

"Its price is too high."

"I give the cost a one out of ten."

"IBM Power is more expensive than other rack-mount servers, and you have to have a license for everything, including cores and memory."

"Price-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten."

"It is designed for a large workload, as opposed to a small workload. For our circumstances, and even as an independent, I can't buy a Power system to experiment on. It can't happen. You cannot buy them."

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

More IBM Power Systems pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

University

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	13

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	19
Large Enterprise	42

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with HPE Apollo?

Some features could be added to HPE Apollo Systems in the future, and I feel that some capability is needed. HPE Apollo Systems is a bit expensive, and there are some issues with scalability. Two f...

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What is your primary use case for HPE Apollo?

I have been distributing this product for three years. I don't have specific use cases, and everything about the major use case for HPE Apollo Systems is good. I don't know the purpose clients are ...

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What advice do you have for others considering HPE Apollo?

I am not using these products today, and I do not work with some specific firewalls. My company is TD Synnex, a distributor company, and I work for this company. My email is , and my first name is ...

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What needs improvement with IBM Power Systems?

In my opinion, the product can be improved by maintaining it and not sunsetting it; that would be my recommendation for IBM. I used to work for IBM for nineteen years, and I know, unfortunately, I ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Power Systems?

I am an architect and system administrator, and I'm responsible for anything related to IBM Power Systems. In IBM Power Systems, I have found a lot of valuable features such as LVM, TCP, ODM, RSCT,...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering IBM Power Systems?

I would recommend IBM Power Systems to others. I have given this review a rating of ten out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 22% of the time

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 14% of the time

Dell PowerEdge XE-Series vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 8% of the time

HPE Synergy vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 7% of the time

Lenovo High-Density Servers vs HPE Apollo Systems

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE Apollo Systems Competitors

Dell PowerEdge R-Series vs IBM Power Systems

Compared 25% of the time

Intel Server System vs IBM Power Systems

Compared 22% of the time

HPE ProLiant DL Servers vs IBM Power Systems

Compared 17% of the time

Oracle SPARC Servers vs IBM Power Systems

Compared 15% of the time

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers vs IBM Power Systems

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Power Systems Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems

January 2026

Download HPE Apollo Systems product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Power Systems

January 2026

Download IBM Power Systems product report

Also Known As

HP Apollo Systems, HP ProLiant SL, HP Apollo

IBM OpenPOWER LC

Overview

The HPE Apollo high-density server family is built for the highest levels of performance and efficiency. They are rack-scale compute, storage, networking, power and cooling – massively scale-up and scale-out – solutions for your big data analytics, object storage and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. From water-cooling that’s 1,000X more efficient than air, to “right-sized scaling” with 2X the compute density for workgroup and private cloud workloads, the HPE Apollo line is a dense, high-performance, tiered approach for organisations of all sizes.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

IBM Power Systems are built to crush the most advanced data applications - from the mission-critical workloads you run today to the next generation of AI.

IBM

Sample Customers

Weta Digital

Cipher

Buyer's Guide

HPE Apollo Systems vs. IBM Power Systems

December 2025

Free Report: HPE Apollo Systems vs. IBM Power Systems

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