IBM Power Systems Reviews

I am a system administrator, and I work with AS/400. I take care of the upgrades. I am also making the CL programs (CLP) and working on RPG skills for myself. 

We have multiple environments. We have Power9, Power8, and Power7. V7R4 is the latest one out there, but V7R3 is the latest one that we have. Companies don't deploy the latest version unless they are sure, and they have got feedback from others about the version. We also have disaster recovery and backup machines.

The flashcopy feature is helping us so much. It reduces time . For example, if we want to have a backup on a machine, we can flashcopy it to another environment, and this first machine is free to use.

Power System is like a dream solution for every IT person because it has redundancy, and it doesn't stop. It doesn't get affected easily.

I don't see any weaknesses in this solution. At the moment, we have Power8. It is stable and runs smoothly. We have a big load, and it is working very well.

The redundancy in Power machines is very important and it gives stability and feasability on all levels. Power systems can integrade different types of storage, which gives the advantage to combine all your storage capacity especially if you go for virrualization.

In Power6, latency was an issue, but nowadays, we are on Power8, which doesn't have any such problems.

Sometimes, we can have issues when we are moving or migrating to a newer version, which is the case with almost every company. Some new issues or problems show up suddenly, and you do not have the time to research and find the solution. That's when we contact IBM technical support. 

It is incredibly stable.

We use IBM technical support not so much per year because everything is clear and has procedure, and most of the time all migrations or upgrades will be prepared and tested before moving to production environment. Sometimes, we face complications while moving to a newer version, where we share such cases with IBMi team. It is very seldom when we do not have the time to research and find the solution. That's when we contact IBM technical support.

We are also in contact with the application supplier, who can provide any request from our side with the fix needed. The deployment will be at our level, first on the testing environment and after the result will meet our team expectations, we deploy it on the production environment.

I didn't use any solution previously.

We are a team of three people. We are responsible for the deployment of the database as well as switching from one machine to another.

We are responsible for OS upgrade. When we are moving from one version to another, sometimes I make plans for that. I also take charge of some other parts because we share everything in the team.

I would say if you are not using the IBMi solution, you are missing something. You should at least know about this solution. I was an IT support previously, and When I started to use IBM Power Systems, I fell in love with this machine due the professionalism, solidity and high scalability . 

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is how not to have a single instance of failure. These machines don't die and don't have any problems. For me, it was astonishing to be able to switch disks or the power supply without turning off the machine. It is a reliable and great solution.

I would rate IBM Power Systems a nine out of ten.

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.

The banking sector primarily uses Power Systems. It is run on their core banking environments due to its stability, reliability, and availability. When it comes to the telecom sector, telecom sectors have been utilizing Power Systems for middleware applications and CR. 

There are many benefits. One Power Systems in a single rack is able to accommodate much more workloads by using physically less space and less power as compared to other platforms, like Intel. That is one benefit. 

Another benefit is that you can perform maintenance and activities. You can conduct a lot of maintenance activities without any outages in your business. 

When you're running Power Systems, it is owned and supported by IBM and AIX operating system is not an open-source operating system. It's an IBM proprietary system. It is built for IBM Power Systems specifically. It works exceptionally well because the hardware, and all the components, and the software, they're all built to work on IBM Power Systems.

Micro-Partitioning is where you can slice your physical code. If you have one code in a system, you can further slice it up to 20%. You can assign one virtual machine, which is called LPAR, 0.05 of a code. It allows you to more effectively use your available system resources. That includes your physical processes, your code, your memories, and allows you to dynamically increase them and decrease them whenever you need without any outage.

There are other features like Live Partition Mobility that allows you to move your workload from one physical Power Systems to another Power Systems, without an outage to the business. 

Active Memory Sharing dynamically adjusted your memory based on the requirements of the logical partition. 

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.

Reliability, availability, and serviceability of the IBM Policy Systems are unmatched. 99% of the maintenance activities can be performed online without having any outage for customers.

It does not offer the ability to run any X86 or X64 Intel architecture-based application on Power Systems. There are a lot of applications, lots of business use cases that do not support this architecture as of now. If somehow application tasks can be ported on to IBM Power Systems, that would be a big improvement.

Power Systems has dominance in terms of features, and the capability is much more powerful than the other competitors right now. Intel is the other primary platform. If you look at Intel x86 and compare it with Power Systems, all of the features are much more reliable, available and serviceable as compared to the Intel platform. The one thing that we lack is that a lot more applications are supported on the internet compared to Power Systems. That's one thing that we primarily lack.

I've been working with Power Systems since 2010. I just left IBM a few months ago. I delivered solutions that contained IBM Power Systems and deployed them in customers' infrastructure at an enterprise level.

I've primarily worked with AIX 6.1, 7.1 and the last one that I deployed was AIX 7.2.

The stability of IBM Power Systems along with the AIX operating system is unmatched. Once you are up and running, you will rarely face any outage. You cannot compare it to any other platform.

Once you are up and running and do not make any changes to your configuration, you will not face many issues. Errors and VFDs outages have been rare as well. If you do not make changes and keep your environment stable, you will not have any outages.

The processes are scalable. You can increase memory on the fly without any outages. With capacity on-demand you can purchase a Power Systems with selected physical cores, and memory activated. When you feel the need for that memory and you feel that you need excess capacity, then you can purchase the license for those, or you can get an hourly license and activate them as per your need and provide your business the extra power that it needs at that time.

For the maintenance, there are two types of components. One is the customer replaceable unit CRU and the FIU that IBM replaced. We have a call home feature that you can enable whenever there's a hardware failure or that sort of problem we'll call the particularly log with IBM, and then IBM supplies the part to the customer. If it is a customer replaceable unit, a single person will go to the data center and replace it.

The difficulty of the initial setup depends. If you talk to someone coming from VMware or Hyper-V, they will find it a bit complex, but if you talk to someone from Linux, they will find it a bit different initially, but with time it becomes very simple and easy to understand. 

IBM Power Systems has some tools, like power VC that is a private cloud on-prem. That allows you to do the whole deployment automatically via a very easy web-based user interface. 

The time it takes to deploy depends on how many virtual machines you need to run, the overall complexity of the solution, and if migrations are involved. The initial deployment can take around five days which includes the initial physical installation in the data center. Then the physical integration with the network, the transfer switches, and the storage is the customer infrastructure. After that, we configure the virtualization. If we configure a single little part, it would usually take you around five days.

As far as the infrastructure is concerned, a single person can deploy it. If the person deploying only has experience with Power Systems and does not have storage skills, you will need someone from the storage team as well to do the deployment. 

There are a lot of day-to-day administrative tasks. Problems that you face in a typical environment, you will not face on Power Systems. If you secure your environment, you can better focus on other productive tasks for your organization, other than spending time logging into your VMs and making changes after every little while and things like that. Your technical teams can offload a lot of the daily routine tasks.

You can compare Power Systems to Oracle Exadata. Oracle Exadata collects only for databases, but IBM Power Systems has a shared processor pool that we can allocate and using this shared processor, we can reduce the licensing cost for Oracle databases and achieve better performance when you combine it with IBM Flash System storage.

Solaris is unique. There are not any other platforms that I would compare to right now.

It's nothing to be scared of it. It might be completely different than what you have been using, but IBM Power Systems is very stable and supports the systems that we have already been using. The Private Cloud IAS offering is included free for all enterprise customers.

It is easy to administrate and manage IBM Power Systems to make the process of moving from VMware or other environments easy.

When you get Power Systems, you get points and after the initial deployment that is performed by IBM, using those points, you can get five days or 10 days of service from IBM. Those services include Power Systems training. If you have enough points, you can get IBM to deliver training. 

I would rate Power Systems an eight out of ten based on the new features that were launched recently. They made it available on the cloud. A customer getting a Power Systems in their environment on plan is very expensive. You can create a VM on the IBM or Google cloud, running on IBM Power Systems. Or you can get the PEP2 client code. There is a little hardware cost.

IBM Power Systems provides very good performance and stability compared to other brands or processors.

IBM should provide a platform where users can learn about the storage and security of IBM Power Systems.

We have had some minor issues with IBM's technical support. However, IBM support is good overall.

I have previously used Intel and Oracle Solaris servers. The performance of IBM Power Systems is very good compared to Intel. IBM Power Systems provides more stability compared to Intel. You have firmware and malware issues with Intel, but IBM Power Systems has no security issues.

You must consolidate and consider with other stakeholders regarding implementing IBM Power Systems.

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

You can use IBM Power Systems instead of other brands if you want something with a critical application.

Overall, I rate IBM Power Systems a nine out of ten.

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.

I primarily use Power Systems for high availability and security.

Power Systems' best features include its user-friendliness and self-checking/self-healing abilities. It's also the best solution for MIMIX and high availability.

Power Systems' price could always be lower.

I've been working with Power Systems for over thirty years.

Power Systems is totally stable.

Power Systems is very scalable.

IBM's tech support is one of Power Systems' best features.

The initial setup is very easy - you just power it on, and it's ready to work in an hour.

Power Systems is very cheap and provides good value for money.

I would 100% recommend Power Systems to other users and would rate it ten out of ten.

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.

The solution is used for defense purposes. It is used in many places, such as banks.

IBM Power Systems are secure and have fast processing.

The solution could improve the memory database for better integration with SAP HANA.

I have been using IBM Power Systems for approximately three years.

The solution is reliable.

IBM offers all business-size solutions. They can offer entry for small, mid-range, and higher-end enterprises solutions.

The solution is easy to scale-out and scale-up.

I have not contacted the technical support of IBM. However, if my customers have issues they contacted IBM directly.

The implementation is straightforward.

IBM does the implementation of the solution for my customers.

The solution does require some maintenance and we provide maintenance services to our customers.

The pricing of the solution is very good because we can beat any other competitor with the pricing. Lately, they have offered good pricing for their customer.

There are different licensing models depending on the user's requirements.

I rate  IBM Power Systems a ten out of ten.