IBM Power Systems Reviews

Most of our landscape is on IBM Power Systems.

IBM Power Systems' best features are its reliability, resilience, and performance per rack unit. IBM Power Systems gives a 75% reduction compared to Intel.

One of the main challenges with IBM Power Systems is the functionality of live partnership mobility. When you're running an L4 on one physical machine, and you want to migrate to another physical machine running live, it's very cost-intensive. In addition, IBM Power Systems is less user-friendly than competitors like VMware or Hyper-V. With IBM Power, you have to go to a command line and configure things one by one. In the next release, I would like IBM Power Systems to include a visual operational management console where I can manage all my IBM Power machines end-to-end. I would also like to see hyperconverged systems with their own storage.

I've been using IBM Power Systems for a year and a half.

IBM Power is pretty stable - I would rate its stability at 4.5 out of 5.

IBM Power is scalable - the amount of memory and number of CPU codes that one system can host is twice that of an Intel machine.

IBM takes its support very seriously - whenever you contact them for support, the people who onboard will know how to resolve the issue smoothly. Also, because IBM owns all the hardware in its machines, they don't refer you anywhere else, they take care of everything themselves.

Positive

IBM Power is a bit complicated to set up compared to Intel-based hypervisors. 

Everything that is available on the cloud version is available on-prem as well. IBM Power is more expensive than other rack-mount servers, and you have to have a license for everything, including cores and memory.

I would give IBM Power a rating of nine out of ten.

We use the solution for Oracle databases mostly. We are trying to bring in some new workloads, like Open Shift and Linux. 

It's been very reliable for Oracle databases. The performance has been very good. 

The reliability and availability are both excellent.

It offers very good security.

The performance and stability are great.

Technical support is helpful.

The solution can scale well. 

They simply need to promote or provide more support to open applications like .NET.

We'd like to see the solution support skill servers. 

The pricing is high.

I've used the solution since 1990.

I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is very reliable and offers very good performance.

I'd rate the scalability ten out of ten. 

We do have plans to increase usage in the future. 

Technical support has been excellent so far.

Positive

The initial setup was very easy to set up. It's not a complex process. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing is a little high. Some models have a good price. However, many are expensive. We do have a lot of taxes in our company, and that adds to the cost.

I would rate the solution ten out of ten. 

I'm using a variety of versions of the solution. I use Power nine, six, five, ten, et cetera.

I'd recommend the solution to others. The performance is great, and it offers excellent reliability. It is a very good platform. However, it is expensive. 

Using IBM Power Systems, one of our latest resolutions was with POWER9. In our organization, we use IBM Power Systems S922 and S924. S924 is a basic database server with 5200 storage. So, that's the server acting as a database server. S922 is for IBM Spectrum Protect and backup. In the solution, an identical product means hardware production, and DR. HA is then implemented.

IBM's pricing and distribution policies differ from those of Dell, making it challenging for partners to adjust. IBM's approach to managing its partners and securing deals is looser than Dell's. As a result, IBM's partners find it challenging to navigate their policies. Although our company also has a partnership with Dell, there is a significant difference in how the two companies manage their respective partners. Nowadays, we are convinced that when we work on a particular opportunity or a deal, IBM pushes it away from us and presents it to a different partner.

The number of times IBM refreshes its operating system appears to be very slow. This case is true when compared to other tools like VMware, Red Hat, or any other Linux products. In general, the updates or the latest versions of other products are much faster than IBM Power Systems, creating an impression in the market that AIX will perish. Even though IBM might be spending time and money on the products, when it comes to the implementation part involving products from IBM or Oracle, they usually don't have a compatible version that works well with Power Linux. Also, compatible versions are mostly available in AIX. From 2017 to 2023, there has been no significant increase in the number of updates or versions from IBM.

I have experience with IBM Power Systems for eleven to twelve years. My company has a partnership with IBM.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It was not me but one of my customers who used a different solution before choosing IBM Power Systems.

Price-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten. It's a costly solution that needs a lot of effort to convince the customer to choose it.

Our company did compare Intel with IBM during our internal evaluation process.

Speaking about the stability of the solution's system once we configure it, if the system goes down, then it takes time for us to bring it back to normalcy is minimal compared to any other enterprise product we've seen in the market. Also, the features in the solution work well. The number of crashes we experience with IBM is minimal. We anticipate that the rest of the features in the solution will work in the background.

Owing to IBM's pricing and lack of support for their partners, particularly their weak partner support policies, we often encounter difficulties, especially when dealing with larger customers. When navigating through their policies, it can feel like we hit a brick wall. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use it to run our current infrastructure and its core and resource planning applications.

The uptime feature is great, and their availability is very high. Since we have been using it, we have not experienced any downtime.

We have been using this solution for more than ten years and are using the Power8 version. It is deployed on-premises.

It is stable, and it has 100% uptime.

It is scalable, and we have a process on demand. Whenever we need additional resources, we pay for the activation. We have close to 10,000 users, and we do not have any plans to increase our users.

The technical support is a direct line, and they are responsive.

We found IBM to be more robust and able to meet our use cases.

The initial setup took us time because we migrated from a legacy to a power system. The migration took us about one week. The OEM IBM provided the consultant that did the installation.

The solution is quite expensive, and deploying it was also expensive. The pricing could be lower.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it to run our important systems and applications.

I think the performance is good.

I think the cost should be cheaper.

I've been using this solution for more than five years.

We've been using it for a long time, and it's stable.

It is scalable. We have about 1000 users.

There is a yearly licensing cost, and it's an expensive solution.

I recommend IBM Power Systems to those who are interested in having the hardware. I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We've used IBM Power Systems in our passport and immigration department. It's a government-run department. 

We've also used it with a few SMEs. They required smaller versions offsite with our systems. We did sell an IBM system to a couple of universities where they had about 20,000 students. It's used in a variety of instances and environments.

I'm working for an IT company and our work is to sell the products, I'm not really a direct user of it. I can't really say much about the features as I'm not an end-user.

The product does offer co-marketing services to their partners.

The solution is the best product on the market.

The technical support that clients get from IBM is excellent.

Overall, IBM actually does restrict us, the sellers, at a limited percentage of margin when you're selling the product. We cannot go above 8%. That's something as a business that can be difficult, as we do suffer because at times. We don't have the option of quoting more and making more money out of it. We can't due to the IBM compliance.

In terms of features, as a salesperson and not an end-user, I haven't really explored the product and can't say exactly what might be lacking.

IBM does have a market presence here in Pakistan, however, the kind of penetration that Huawei has is a lot more. They have a larger enterprise team that sells products here and they have a direct relationship with the customers. IBM relies a lot more on the partners rather than going to the customers directly. Due to their approach, Huawei has captured about 70-80% of the server and storage industry and market in Pakistan.

I do understand that IBM does offer co-marketing funds for us to actually promote IBM and its products. We have actually utilized them in the past as well, maybe three, four years ago. However, IBM does have a very, very, strict kind of compliance. When it comes to us providing documentation, there is cross-questioning. Our finance team may even back out not because of the misuse of money, but because of the amount of documentation required. It's not worth it for our marketing and finance team to utilize the offer. It's too rigorous and it takes them off dealing with other aspects of their jobs.

IBM should be more flexible with marketing or offer marketing events themselves and invite the partners to attend. That might be far more productive.

We've been dealing with the solution for five or six years at least at this point. It may even be a bit longer. It's been a while.

We've sold this product to a variety of organizations, from SMEs to government departments to universities, and the sizing suits them all.

We do plan to continue to offer the product to other clients in the future.

Our team has never escalated any issues when it comes to getting support directly from IBM. In that sense, they are pretty much satisfied. It's my understanding that support is something that IBM is really good at. That's the reason why IBM does have the type of customers who do have the appropriate budget and who really value the services and the after-sales services and support that IBM offers.

We have our own installation and deployment team for IBM. They handle all aspects of it so that the client doesn't have to worry about the technical side.

We handle the implementation for our clients.

The solution is relatively expensive if you compare it with any competitors of IBM. I would say you need to compare this price with the Huawei or with HPE and probably with Dell EMC. 

Their products are relatively cheaper compared to IBM. I do understand that IBM does offer the best product, however, in terms of pricing, that's something that does limit us. Usually, when we participate in opportunities we do qualify when it comes to the technical side of things. Financially we are looking at the highest or maybe the second-highest price. That's something that actually makes us not want to sell IBM if we can avoid it.

We typically use the latest versions of the solution. We tend to follow whatever the customer requirement is. They are inclined to work by night in the office on the latest product that IBM is offering.

We work with on-premise as, over here at least, people are not too inclined towards the cloud. They prefer having hardware of their own in their own data centers.

I'd recommend this solution to other organizations.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight.

Better pricing would be one thing that may convince me to give it higher marks. 

In 2013, I joined IBM Pakistan as an IT specialist. Where I used to work as a system manager, the guy who used to work with Power Systems, with OSAIX and IBM storage. Then, I was shifted to IBM Europe in the Czech Republic. There's a CIC center in Brno, where I've worked with IBM as well, but as a third-level support guy. Now I'm based in Qatar, and worked for  government organization. I work as a system specialist for the Power Systems and the unit support as well, the operation stuff. I worked for eight years or more before this AIX and Power Systems and storage. 

I worked as an operations guy for whole IT operations and as well as the implementation. Because there were so many clients from the banking sector, from the government sector, and telecom industry, they mostly have the billing systems on the Power Systems. 

Now, I work as a unified system specialist.

IBM Power Systems is mostly used for specific IBM products because the system AIX is actually propriety of IBM. You cannot install it on any other platform. You can use it in different domains, like SAP HANA, do rack data and rack warehouses. Users in the telecommunication use it. They were using as an IBM Middleware product. An IBM Middleware product was being used solely on the Power Systems.

IBM has started supporting Red Hat, so people use Red Hat and some clients do put it in a cloud environment as well. The core baking system runs on that because most of the core banking like Oracle Financials are being used on this.

The use case depends on what the customer requirement is.

I started working with Power4 back in 2012, and almost Power4, Power5, 6, 7, 8, and now I am working with Power9 as well.

The banking environment was running the physical servers of like five to six stacks. The utilization of the physical space they were renting out reduced. It enables them to save space. Because when you're leasing, space counts. They were saving quite a healthy amount of money.

The maintenance of the physical hardware is more complex because there were different systems running and you need to go directly into the data center to use it. Now, when it comes to Power Systems, they were using the virtual system and were sitting on centers to verify if there was a hardware failure.

It also saves the cost of having one person at the data center solely looking at data systems. This also saves costs.

When you're using five stack or six stacks, the power utilization of those servers will be high as compared to the two stacks. If you need to add more CPU resources, compute resources to the server, adding those to a physical server is sometimes impossible because there is limited capacity. But when it comes to IBM Power, they have high compute resources. You can add it and you can utilize it. It comes with five or six years of planning. If you have planning and a good planner, then you can use the system for the next four, five years, and that can easily fulfill your requirements. 

The availability of a solution depends on the requirement of the customer. The most valuable feature is the virtualization. You can have this one system or you can use it for many. They were using almost 120 servers within that specific service.

Within those two servers, there were 150 and then 30 LPARS running, and they were running all their core banking applications over that, from T24 to Oracle Financials, and their Oracle databases. It supports a variation.

You can use the same systems in the telecommunication industry as a middleware. Now, the whole scenario and the whole application are different. IBM Middleware is an application that is supported by IBM. They support these applications on their own platform.

It’s been 8 years now with IBM Power Systems.

I have had customers who have been using it for three years with no issues. You don't need to do a reboot. I run Linux on Power Systems and it is more stable. You don't need to reboot over again. 

It is scalable. It is one of the most important requirements, as an operational system of any IT industry. When they utilize the support that they are running on Oracle databases there is some load on the database, and they want to increase the compute or the resources of the system. This is one of the most critical things, which you usually face almost every day in an operational environment.

IBM provides a solution for that, without shutting down those systems called LPAR, you can increase the compute resources for that. You can increase it online. You don't need to go and switch it off because of the old system. In fact, you don't need to shut it down and then increase. The downtime is minimal compared to the physical hardware.

The scalability process should be simplified.

We have used their support. There are some nodes that only a technical support rep is able to see if there is an issue. In the last three years though, I have only needed to contact them twice. I never had any drastic issues. 

There are several levels of escalation. A level one, severe issue will be responded to in around four hours. If it is not severe then it can take 12 to 18 hours to get a response. 

I would rate their support a ten out of ten. I always find them very helpful, going down to the lowest level to fix the issues.

No I didn’t use any other systems and migrate to IBM Power, migrations are mostly from Old Power system to new release.

The deployment depends on customer requirements. There are various factors that can determine if it will be a simple deployment or difficult deployment. IBM Power Systems gives us a certified engineer, that usually comes through your domain and implements the systems. There are a few best practices that you need to follow. If you are an IBM customer or IBM person or an IBM engineer, then you follow those specific guidelines.

Sometimes the customer's requirements are simple so the deployment is simple but sometimes they have a lot of requirements. 

It takes around seven days to deploy it. 

Power systems usually implemented by coustomer in house team and there are few people i can still remember are quite skilled.

I usually work as support and implementation personal, ROI usually calculated by customers internally.

If the organization is small, with 20 to 30 people, they don't usually go for IBM because it's more expensive for a smaller organization. 

Smaller organizations of 10-50 people don't have millions of dollars in their budget. If you compare a banking environment, they have millions of budget behind them so they can afford IBM. 

It is mostly try to compare it with VMWARE virtualization as it supports Linux, but when it comes to stability, IBM Power systems are unmatchable.

When you implement the IBM Global Systems, you must take care of the small things. If you do it perfectly at the start, it will give you more stability at the end of the day. If you don't take care of the small technicalities then in the middle somewhere, there will be high load on the system and you will face issues. 

IBM has the best solution in the market and is always comparable to any service provider in the market. I always rate them 10 out of 10 because it's the best product.

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.