IBM Power Systems Reviews

I use IBM Power Systems for databases.

The most valuable feature of IBM Power Systems is its performance.

IBM Power Systems could improve by having a cloud feature.

I have been using IBM Power Systems for approximately 15 years.

The stability of IBM Power Systems is good.

IBM Power Systems is scalable in my experience.

We have approximately 10,000 people using this solution in my organization. We do not plan to increase usage.

The support provided by IBM Power Systems is very good.

I have not used any other solution in the past.

The setup of IBM Power Systems is easy because I have experience with it before. The full deployment took approximately four months.

We used a partner for the implementation of the solution.

We have seven engineers that provide the maintenance and support of our IBM Power Systems.

The price of IBM Power Systems is expensive and could improve.

I have evaluated Oracle before we decided to choose IBM Power Systems.

I would advise those who want to use IBM Power Systems to always have technical support.

I rate IBM Power Systems a ten out of ten.

Right now we use Power for high-end AIX systems. We're always looking to leverage what we're using. We have some high-end customers on our P8s. The one thing that makes life easier is it's very dependable.

Power runs our resilient data systems, our high-end databases, stuff that can't go down. I enjoy the isolation factor, that it's not Linux, but then again it can be challenging to keep up. The Linux and VMware stuff, the administration seems to be a little easier than Power, but that's why I'm employed.

Licensing has always been an issue, but with IBM machines a serial number is licensed with support. If you don't pay for it, you don't get it. 

I would like to see firmware available to all of the systems. We have some older systems that we've taken off support, that we're not going get rid of right now, but I'm not able to legally update the firmware on that. That's just a little nitpick that I have.

I'd like them to make stuff that little bit more seamless, a little bit more user friendly. They have come a long way since the early days. You can deploy a system right now in minutes compared to days, in the early days. But that's what growth is all about.

Scalability is very seamless. The new enhanced GUI for the HMCs make adding partitions a lot easier than the classic view, so it's not as involved. I think they're trying to get more like the VMware side where you can add a machine, edit the properties, and turn it on, and go about your business.

We have some AIX 6 that we cannot upgrade because the customers will not let us upgrade it, and we've had to purchase extended support. We put everybody on 7 where we can. I personally have not seen the benchmarking between 6 and 7, but normally people are very comfortable when their mission-critical applications are on it. I'm comfortable with it. I'm comfortable with AIX in general, for mission-critical systems.

If I'm running a web server, or something I don't care if it goes down, I'll put that on Linux. But if I'm running a high-end database, accessing health records at 1000 transactions per second, I want it on a tried and true, supported operating system on high-end hardware.

We have CTS support. They're very white-glove, so I think it's top-notch.

I haven't had any experience in that. Normally we get a P7 box and it runs P7 forever; and we get a P8 box, and it runs P8.

We're an IBM/VMware shop, so all of our AIX runs on Power, and everything else is going to run on VMware. We're a composite type shop.

In terms of how Power uniquely positions us in the healtcare industry, it is an industry that has very little downtime. Nobody likes to take any downtime at all. The Power systems, they're very dependable. We can normally depend on them not going down. We have had a few issues here and there, but for the most it's a set-and-forget type thing.

They don't like to release the systems for updates, unless it's critical and I have to take it away from them. That's the thing I like the Power Systems, that they're just extremely dependable.

I think they've really started down a good path with the HMC; making people go to the enhanced GUI. I think not everybody embraces change, but once they get a hang of the new HMC, there's a lot of cool features in there.

In terms of IBM being a market leader for servers, obviously with the advent of Open Source, and Linux, and virtualization - while I don't do a lot of hardware - I think they're the "big boys." I think they probably need to be more vigilant about VMware and the like. VMware is not exactly eating their lunch because they're two separate business models. Obviously IBM is the leader. But, you can tell that other companies are nipping at their heels, and they want into that market share.

PowerHA, the high availability software. That is something that we like.

We are a partner to IBM, we do product development for IBM. We're not a customer of Power Systems. We are developing only on AIX and for all versions of Power, 6, 7, 8.

It helps in delivering mission critical applications, very high reliability. It doesn't fail, it's a very stable platform, very reliable, and the user interface is good. The administrative cost and expenses are also low. It's good.

Very stable, absolutely. POWER9 is expected in the market and that's going to be, I would say, revolutionary. It is going to turn around the market in terms of the market share, in favor of Power Systems. I would say that if the price point is right, and the execution is good, this can really be a very successful platform for mission critical applications in future.

Based on the architecture I do believe that it is very scalable. And with the POWER9 processor coming up I think scalability will be even better, because the processor speed will be much faster. I'm assuming you will not need so many cores to activate, to scale up. 

Power Systems have always been very, very scalable.

My engineering team closely works with the IBM team in some of this areas. I do believe that things are very smooth, in terms of the support and whatever we have to deliver.

I believe that the Power platform has a very high return on the initial investment because of the kind of scalability and the reliability that the system has. It also provides the ability to meet multiple workloads - with such high reliability - because of the PowerHA platform. 

The powerHA product that we are building on it is really making the product very reliable and very cost effective for the customer. So the the TCO, total cost of ownership, is really low when you compare it with x86 platform or any other platform.

The initial investment may be high, but at the end of the day you have to look at it from a three-year or five-year point of view. And that's where Power really scales way above any other computing platform.

In terms of how Power can uniquely position a company within its industry, it can be the most favored system for cognitive error. When I say "cognitive", of course, that is an IBM term. In the digital environment, where artificial intelligence is very important, there is machine learning been done, there are different kinds of applications coming up. Power Systems can be a very reliable platform for workloads which are mission critical, which are futuristic. There's a lot of work done on artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc.

In future versions I'm definitely very excited to see the roadmap of the Power PC, and the ability to connect with other GPUs like NVIDIA. NVLink is a very exciting development that happened in POWER8. I do believe, going forward, the ability to meet different workloads and multiple workloads, which are more intensive in terms of CPU and compute, is going to be the key and that's what I like about Power.

The OpenPOWER initiative is something, which is really great. It's embracing other Open Source, Linux as well as other platforms, so that you can give a total solution to the customer. You don't just have the applications, which are based only on AIX, you are making the platform more open for different kind of workloads to be done.

IBM has been the market leader for decades now, in this space. I do believe there is competition, but I think embracing OpenPOWER is an area which is going to really help IBM with the ability to meet the price performance that the market demands today. If that can happen, I do believe IBM is not only going to maintain its leadership position, it can even grow its position in terms of the market share for its systems and platforms.

The chip itself is a higher performing chip than x86 chips, and we get the IBM hardware on top of it.

To not have to manage the chipset or have the software or hardware really be a concern for us. It just runs itself.

This isn't really related to Power, it's related more to the OS system level, but instead of chasing the industry they should lead the industry. A lot of the things that are being deployed on Power now are things like Node.js and things of that nature. But they're chasing the market, they're not leading the market.

Since the beginning.

We have had issues, but they haven't been because of Power, they've been because of partner errors on our system.

The scalability is phenomenal as it scales up. I'm here at the Power Conference to learn about how I can possibly scale out with the Power systems.

They are very knowledgeable but there's some bureaucracy as far as the time to respond goes, as far as getting back to us with what we need.

They tend to request logs an awful lot when the solution doesn't always warrant that.

We started on a System/36 and grew into the AS/400 and we're still going with IBM i. It was always IBM because a lot of our code is written in-house. We're definitely planning on moving up to POWER 8 in the future.

The big version releases, as far as 5 to 6, and 6 to 7 were complicated. All the point releases were fairly straightforward.

In terms of the upgrades from previous versions, we definitely see a return on investment. We get more processor, more CPW, and it's basically the same price.

We are currently using version 7.2 with IBM i only.

I don't know that Power uniquely positions our business, it's more of what we do as a business to position ourselves, as far as our commitment to customer service and customer care.

I think they're definitely a leader in the server industry as far as Power goes. From what I've been hearing at this conference, they're doing a lot with the Power chip to help maintain that position. So, I'm happy with it.

The threading, the portability through LPM, the ability for it to easily migrate between the environments, and the power of the chip. The flexibility of the chip, we found pretty nice.

We have the ability to fairly dynamically add resources to the servers, to the LPARS, as we need them; I don't know that other systems have that flexibility. At least from what I've seen.

It would be the efficiency of the chip, the ability to handle a phenomenal amount of load for not a lot of money. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to.

What I'd like to see would be more of a usage-based licensing model. COD got close, but you still have to buy the basic things, and you can't turn them off really well. Then they came out with being able to use it for 30 days. After that, you might as well just buy the processor.

It would be nice to each month go through and say, "Okay. This is what we're using," pay for it, true up, and be much more like that cloud-ish type thing with an on-prem. With all the benefits of being on-prem.

Excellent. They're usually knowledgeable.

I inherited it. We use it because it's been performing well. In our world, we essentially have POWER systems or Intel-based applications, and we generally find the compute and the processing power, and the ability to handle the load, is far better on the POWER systems.

In terms of upgrades, we've gone through multiple iterations. It was complex, but it was intuitive. We have an AIX team. They were able to upgrade the environment. Stand up the new environment. We were able to use LPM to migrate the load over from the old POWER7 to POWER8. It worked pretty well.

We don't really measure because we lease the system, so we have a natural opportunity. I would expect that if we went back and we tracked the performance per dollar spent, we would see a return on investment improvement.

We have two POWER E850s and one E870. Most of our transactional systems, engineering, they're mostly out-of-the-box applications. PeopleSoft, Siebel, engineering applications.

I consider IBM to be a market leader in the server sector. They need to keep creating a price-effective system that competes with commodity hardware, which I believe they've done so far.

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.

We are currently using IBM Power Systems for applications and database core banking.

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

I would like to see IBM Power Systems integrate with all cloud types.

I have been using IBM Power Systems for the past seven years.

IBM Power Systems is the most stable solution in the world.

The scalability of IBM Power Systems is good.

IBM Power Systems is very expensive. We have mid-range, entry, and enterprise. Every machine has its own licensing.

The setup of IBM Power Systems is complex. There are many steps and it takes three days to a week.

Before you purchase IBM Power Systems you should consider capacity requirements. 

I work with Dell servers in addition to IBM Power Systems.

I would rate IBM Power Systems an eight out of ten.

I am happy with the performance. Now that we are moving to Linux on Power, I'm really surprised at how fast it is, compared to AIX, seeing them side by side. Linux doesn't have all of the wrapping around it that AIX does to provide various security measures and things of that nature, so it can run much faster.

The improvements that I would like to see are probably the same as what everyone else wants, more speed, less electricity and less HVAC required to run it.

We have been using POWER8 since it came out in 2014. We are using POWER8 and POWER7. We are really off of six at this point. I am just waiting for POWER9 now.

Well, from what I have done with it, it's pretty nice and very easy to do all that.

Excellent, really excellent. They try really hard to make sure the tech guys who are going to do the service and support are brought up to speed before it goes out and hits the market. Although they can only go so far with that and some things just have to be learned once it's out in the field, it's pretty impressive how ready they are when it hits the market.

Upgrading the hardware from one version to another was pretty simple but the software, not so much.

This doesn't really apply to me, but I certainly think the customers are seeing ROI in their move from seven to eight. I don't know anybody who moved to eight and said, "Darn, I wish I had stuck with seven." They seem to be pretty happy and that's usually the best measure, right?

I didn't get to choose, it's the platform that I was given to work on. But if I had to choose, I'd probably choose Power anyway. I like that it's not Intel because we have a monoculture in CPU's.

We are on AIX and we're starting to move to Power Linux. That's new for us this year. It's marketing requirements. The customers are voting, they are requesting it.

The UNIX market, in general, is shrinking and Linux is not considered UNIX. I'm not sure it's so similar, but it's a different kernel. They don't want to go to Windows either, so you're running out of choices so they move to Linux. If we want to stay viable, we have to do that as well. 

AIX will always have a spot. If you look at the history of all the problems with these platforms, Linux, in its young life, already has way more than AIX. If that's your thing, if you want it to be rock solid, then you are going to stick with AIX forever, as long as you possibly can. But a lot of people are making the jump, a jump into Linux. We are jumping too.

The Open Power Foundation has brought about advances by introducing new ideas. As I mentioned earlier with the monoculture thing, you get the same group of people who work on these things forever and they are really smart, they get out and they read books, and they get all the information they can, but you really need that stimulus from outside. You need to come to conferences, you need to get around and involved with more people. That is why Opensource works so well. It's the same idea. You need that diversity of opinion and thought to really get the best out of it. I think if we are going to see really big leaps forward on the Power platform, it's going to come from that.

I definitely think that IBM is a market leader in the server sector. I think what they need to do is stick with the open approach that they have adopted over the years. That is really the only way that works anymore. I think the days of enterprise companies being completely closed are just about gone and I'm glad they are. You just get so much better work out of the community.