IBM Power Systems Reviews

• HMC
• PowerVM

It allows us to share the resources with multiple lines of businesses. That's one issue we had with one line of business, purchasing a physical server then it would be dedicated to that line of business. There would be one OS on it so a lot of the resources were not utilized. Now with PowerVM, we're actually able to sell them the LPAR itself and the corporate entity can purchase the physical asset. This allows us to push the utilization up to 70 to 80%.

I think IBM needs a little more work on managing the overall environment with eliminating Systems Director. They need something that you can use to manage the entire environment; it's kind of where they're going with PowerVC, but with the POWER5, 6 and 7 they're out in the cold now. It's just upgrading to 8 and managing everything with PowerVC, then it will be a lot easier. But any of the older technology is going to be out in the cold, managing one at a time.

We've been using Power for 10 years. We're running versions 5 through 8.

Lots of issues, but with hardware an issue we faced with our POWER7s has been the voltage regulators. IBM has been pretty good about that. They've been keeping voltage regulators onsite, so that if we do have an issue they're able to replace them in an expedient amount of time.

It's very scalable. That's one of the advantages of Power, the ability to isolate every LPAR, whereas with Oracle using the containers, you have a global container, so it's difficult to segregate those. The way the Hypervisor does it on Power, you can actually have PCI and non-PCI on the same physical asset and still maintain PCI compliancy, but on x86, on Oracle, you cannot do that.

Our SSRs in our primary datacenter are fabulous. We have one SSR, he's onsite almost every day. We actually have an office for him whether he's working on our work or he's working on the other customers that he supports. It doesn't matter, we give him the access to our site too. He's a very valuable member of our team, even though he's an IBM SSR.

We were a large Solaris shop, so we had a lot of Sun and we outsourced to IGS. When IGS came in we started replacing a lot of the Sun with Power.

Hardware upgrades, now that we're with our virtualization, is pretty simple. We just LPM from one to the other. 

The software is a little more complex than I think it should be. I think there is some stuff that they could do with the patch bundles. They call it a patch bundle, but really it's not a bundle. There are a bunch of patches there, and you have to do an MGET and get all of them at once instead of it being one tar bundle, and you just download that tar bundle and then untar it. Then you have them. If your LTP fails during the download, it's like, "Well I didn't get them all, so, which one did I get?" Let me just erase everything and restart. 

I'd rather just grab a tarball and untar it and that way I'd have the readme right there in that uncompressed location. 

It's some of the stuff that they have like their VIO, I just downloaded the VIO DVD one, DVD two; I think it's the expanded tool kit. They're all compressed differently. One is a raw ISO, one is a compressed ISO, and the other one was a gzip tar file. I'm thinking, "Why aren't they all the same?"

Some of that gets a little irritating but you just have to deal with it and, hopefully, somebody will realize it and fix it.

In terms of the upgrades, moving from previous versions to POWER8, I absolutely see a return on investment. We're virtualizing it, and being able to share across the multiple organizations that we support, we're able to push the utilization upwards of 70%. 

Previously we would create physical LPARs and there would be one or two LPARs and we'd only be utilizing 10% of a 770, or the 570s, or 670s. So it was a got a million dollar system, and we were using 10%. That's $100,000 worth of use, $900,000 is not being used. 

Now we're pushing that utilization to where we have a lot more virtual LPARs and we're actually using that full system instead of having ten million-dollar systems. We have one million-dollar system and we're using ten virtuals on it.

We use competitors, Intel-based Linux.

IBM is moving faster with their improvements than we can implement. Coming here, to the Power User Conference, to learn the new features means I then go home and try to implement this feature and see how we can actually make this a value add for our organization.

Power is the best. There's not much that can beat the way they virtualize it. And the HMCs, being able to manage the entire environment.

They're definitely a leader. They lack the advertisement to new corporate CEOs. You're starting to see more advertisements of Watson. But AIX... the Power environment and the value add that it has over Intel, not so much. Everybody thinks that Intel is so much more cheaper than the IBM, but it's because it's not marketed correctly. 

With Power servers, you get so much included with your purchase. You get the virtualization, you get the operating systems. Whereas, with Intel, you get hardware and then you have to add all of the operating systems, the virtualization if you're using VMware. And once you start adding that up, that commodity server is now only hundreds of dollars difference from an IBM server. A lot of corporations aren't looking at it that way.

I think the biggest driving factor for the bank is the cost, the cost-performance profile, it's better than anything else.

If you virtualize, Power hardware allows you to oversubscribe CPUs, and we take a big advantage of that for the bank. We save the bank millions of dollars by oversubscribing, because we have probably 700 DevOp servers, where they develop software. The developer might have 40 or 50 servers. They don't run them all at the same time, maybe three or four of them do. So we give those 40 or 50 servers just a couple of CPUs. We way oversubscribe. In fact, IBM-ers raise their eyebrows when we tell them our oversubscription rate.

The virtualization. Power was the first solution to have it. Now everybody does virtualization, like VMware, etc. But Power was there a long time before everybody else. 

We virtualize everything, we're about 95% virtual. The virtualization and the quality you get from it is one reason we like the solution.

Regarding new features, we like where it's going. I really can't think of something newer that they are not currently working on.

Except for Power on Linux. The licensing for software products, including IBM's products - it costs you more to run Linux on Power than it does AIX. That's something I would like to see them improve. We would like to go to Power Linux, but all the software that we are using - and I'm talking like IBM software, like Webster - they don't let you oversubscribe the software. It's not cost effective.  

If you didn't know better, if you didn't do these things, you probably wouldn't care and you would put Linux on Power. But 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.

Stability is great. The old saying was, you talked about the "five 9s" of reliability. We're at something like seven 9s. We've never really had a major outage. 

We've had outages, but it was the network that went down, or a SAN outage, or somebody, a person, pushed the wrong button. But the infrastructure itself, the IBM Power hardware has never failed us.

No issues. And we take advantage of that scalability. I have a few frames where we have over 200 servers on a frame.

We have IBM support. We are a big IBM user. In fact, we use their support for Middleware. They're excellent.

I'm not a good person to ask. This is what I do. To me it's easy, I think it's easy to learn. I think the one problem new people have is - and this isn't just something that relates to IBM - the phraseology is different. So something in VMware might mean something different in the Power world. The lingo, there's some new jargon, and new acronyms that you have to learn. But once you get around that, you realize this thing is the same as this other thing on another system; just a different word.

In terms of a move from version to version, and the return on investment from a move from POWER7 to 8, or from 5 to 6, I would say the software has gotten friendlier, more robust, easier to use, easier to upgrade. I think the advantages you get from going to POWER6, POWER7, POWER8 are a bigger thing than going from AIX 6 to 7.

On the hardware side the upgrades are great. With POWER8 we picked up SMT8, and that made a big improvement. If you have applications that can take advantage of it - we run mostly IBM software - so of course the software is enabled.

The cost model is great. There is so much built in to the technology, that if you know how to use it you can save yourself a lot of money. Again I'll go back to what I said earlier: We're saving millions of dollars on software cost by oversubscribing. I know a lot of other users that don't do that. Either they don't understand how some of the technology works, or they're afraid to try it. All the advanced features that are built into this platform we use.

To start out, I actually put the first Power systems in the bank. The first applications we were using, they only ran on Power. There's one application, that we call "wire transfer" - banks use that to transfer money to the Federal Reserve - and it only runs on AIX Power. That's what really got us going. Then, over time people realized it was a better. We used to be an HPE shop and over time we proved that we were better than HPE, and we just retired our last HPE server.

We're on all versions of Power. We just retired a POWER4 box, but we have POWER5, 6, 7, and 8. We have all these versions primarily because we're a bank, and we have a lot of old applications. It's hard to get people to upgrade their applications so we can upgrade their hardware. We use it strictly for AIX.

We're running about 1200 servers right now. I have a couple old POWER5 and POWER6 frames, as I said previously, but most of our stuff is on POWER8. We have about 18 870 enterprise servers, and that is where the bulk of our stuff is. We are trying to get everything over to the newer stuff.

Power uniquely positions our bank in the industry because we are almost 100% virtualized, so we're cloud-ready, if you will. In fact, we view our AIX environment as a private cloud at the bank. That is one of the big things. 

And the Power solution is a lot more customizable that many of the others. We have some unique infrastructure things at the bank that it fits perfectly.

In terms of some people saying they want less "green screen," less command line, they're talking about UNIX, and historically UNIX is a command-line type of interface, a text interface. We can do a GUI in AIX, and most people don't use it. In fact, the only time you see a GUI is when people are installing software, because Oracle or DB2 has a GUI install interface, so you have to fire up a GUI.

I think IBM is a leader in the server market. I'm an old guy, back when I got into AIX, the Sun servers - the big Sun 10Ks and 18Ks, the HP Superdomes - those were all the enterprise servers, those were the servers of choice. Then came Power AIX, now they're number one. There is no more Solaris. HPE is struggling, they finally quit making their own hardware. They are doing x86. The Power hardware is just so much better than x86 hardware.

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.

Specifically about System i, it's simple, it's secure, it has a lot of resiliency. As far as I know, we've never been attacked by a virus.

I've been supporting core banking for the past 15 to 20 years directly in Power, and before I was supporting banking in OS/390.

Power systems are compact, their licenses are not as expensive as OS/390, and they fit the banking solution. They're very easy to run and operate for computer operators. They're all menu driven, it's English driven, and you can have different languages. It's a great system. It works for me.

Security is one. But it's a total, comprehensive solution.

It's really good for banking. As a matter of fact, I know many banks that are using AS400s as their back end on Power. It scales a lot, you can just keep on adding frames, you can add on CPUs, you get capacity on demand, you can tune the machine very easily to handle different workloads. It's very efficient, it's secure, it's robust and resilient, you can add on disaster recovery and it's cool.

IBM could perhaps be a bit more aggressive in terms of marketing, and let customers really know that they're out there and can offer a helping hand to move them along, to implement all these great features. Because, in attending the classes here at the IBM Power Conference, over the years, every time they ask, "Are you on this latest and greatest feature?" many people are not there as yet. Yet the feature may have been announced a few years ago. Sometimes it's because companies need to have migration projects, and a bit of money and time to get this going.

IBM could be more aggressive in that area.

I know lab services does a lot of work but systems, if they could include some kind of lab services and bundling of services to get you to the greatest and latest feature at the already included cost... If you include the cost in the base machine, you pay for something once, or it's in your maintenance... because to go and ask for money every time, it's a problem.

Power systems, pretty much since they came out. I've been using AS400 system since the '90s, and I continue to use them, System i.

The upgrade from version to version is not complex. I think it's fairly straightforward and IBM provides a lot of documentation, check-listing, features, so all you've have to do is be methodical, go through the checklists step by step and it's fine.

No issues. If we needed capacity in an emergency, a few years back, we would call IBM if we had a problem. They could turn on a code and we could have an extra CPU. But these days, capacity is in pretty good shape. We have some resources we can move around to give the systems that need it more capacity, and we can move capacity dynamically.

And we know the workloads, so the machine is set to run dynamically. If we need capacity, we get it. We run things and we have all these monitoring capabilities, we monitor stuff, we send alerts and it works fine.

Some of our work is actually outsourced to IBM for the hardware. The hardware works fine, the Power hardware, it's amazing. Years back they had some 10-key disk drives that would tend to fail, but recently disk drives are really much improved, and you can do hot swap. You can pull a drive out, put a new one in.

Apart from disk drives, really and truly you don't see many hardware issues. You may have a power supply that fails, but because of all the redundancy, it's good.

And on the software side, there is hardly a need for support calls. The key is, as long as you're patching very often and you're up to date with the PTFs, it runs pretty well.

In terms of the upgrade from version to version, we see a return on investment, absolutely. There are always features, improvement, SQL and Java; on the hardware, on Power. 

With the technology, when I went from POWER5 to POWER6, I got a something like a 71% increase in horsepower. When I went from POWER6 to 7 I think it was a 20% improvement in CPW. And I believe from POWER7 to 8, I've been told it's either 75% or double.

So every time IBM comes out with a newer chip, great improvements.

Really mostly IBM for the workload that we run. IBM and the System i is very well suited for it, for the core banking systems.

Recently there have been a lot of changes, and a lot of good things that we are planning to use. What we've been seeing is that within the Power system itself, there are more and more capabilities and features. You do not have to go outside and buy a third-party program product - like for replication, you don't have to go to a third-party. Years ago, you'd have to go for system monitoring.

IBM is building in all the tools you need to run the system: monitoring, replication, disaster recovery. I think if IBM continues to do the same thing - and every day they're bringing the price point down, with more CPW - they should just keep on doing what they're doing.

I don't have a problem with Power systems, especially running System i. For people running AIX, the interface is a bit more cryptic and they need a lot of commands. But once you implement System i on Power, it's a 10. It rocks. We're doing some work in Mexico right now where we're converting from OS/390 to Power systems.

The solution's most valuable features are speed and capacity on demand. It works faster than Intel Power Processor.

They should improve the solution's pricing. Also, they should provide proper documentation to understand the setup process.

I have been using the solution for more than two years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a very scalable solution as it has capacity on demand. We can activate many features depending on the business requirements.

The solution’s technical support team is good.

I have worked with Lenovo Server, HP Server, Dell Server, and SolarWinds earlier.

The solution’s initial setup was complex.

The solution's native server is not much expensive. But, the additional software required for visualization and data protection is highly-priced.

The solution is suitable for prevention and maintenance. If you have the budget and a knowledgeable executive to manage the system, you should buy IBM Power Systems. I rate it a nine out of ten for its availability and visibility.

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.

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.

• 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.