IBM Power Systems Reviews

I just like the levels of redundancy that are there. Your power's redundant, your pathing's redundant. You can split up your buses, split up your expansion units. It's hard to take those boxes down, really. So, if they are up they'll run for years.

One other thing I really like is how they are going to integrate the HMCs into the frames now, so you don't have a standalone appliance, it's just built into the frame. I haven't worked with anything like that yet but hopefully soon.

One of the big things I've seen is that you can dynamically move devices or processor memory, capacity on demand, things like that. We actually just used the CUoD feature this past year. We enabled four more cores on our server. It kinda got us out of a gray spot.

For me, as an AS/400 I series guy, I think there's a lot of benefits to that OS. I think a lot of users really like it, despite the green screens. But after you get working with it, you're very familiar with it. So, to me, the hardware's there and I think the AS/400 or iSeries OS is very good as well.

I would like for there to be more clarity around the licensing. You'll get your PVUs and CPWs and some apps are licensed on one, some are on another.

That box has probably been running for us for over 10 years. I've been working with Power directly for over five years.

I primarily work with Power 570, and so we're running some of our AS/400 on it with IBM i. We are also running POWER8 in the right spots in our environment. I'm kind of known as the legacy track but I'm glad to have the 570 anyway.

The stability is beyond belief. You can't beat it. 

We experience issues every once in a while. I think it's more due to our applications and how we're licensed that sometimes we have to get a little crafty there.

They're very strong. And especially the FSRs that come out. Those guys have been working with Power boxes for decades.

No, we are pretty set with IBM Power. We're running AIX and SAP all on Power boxes.

I definitely see IBM as a market leader in the server industry in regards to their hardware. There is a lot of talk about them going more open-source and I think they are there, running Linux on Power and being more actively involved with that user group. But that's maybe a catch-22 as well, but I think they are leveraging that and that is what is going to take them forward.

The reliability is the main thing. Reliability and ease of use. The cost of ownership is down too.

It runs all our enterprise systems and because of the reliability, we don't have the same issue with downtime and unexpected downtime that other companies may have. I have been there for 10 years, running the Power, and we've had three unexpected experiences of downtime in 10 years.

We just want to see continued reliability and performance. And continued value for the price. The licensing could be simplified.

I have been using Power for 10 years. I have POWER7 and POWER8 and I use them for IBM i. We also have an 822L and Linux Red Hat. We started using Power on Linux a few months ago. We moved to it mainly because of the reliability.

It's got all the scalability I need. I can add on to to the box that I've got. Scale it out from where I'm at.

I have not had any problems with technical support. They have all done well every time I have needed them.

We were using Power5.

It was pretty straightforward. I have been doing this a long time, so it is pretty straightforward for me. There are more hardware things now that I've moved to external storage. It does become a little more complex there.

The licensing has improved over the years. I've been working with IBM for 30-plus years. The licenses have gotten better. We are experiencing some issues with Linux licensing between the different flavors, between Ubuntu and Red Hat, and which license you need for which machine, so that's getting to become a little complex.

No.

The OpenPOWER Foundation has brought many advantages. There are a lot more things available now, carried over from other industries.

I personally do consider IBM to be a market leader in servers. In order to maintain that position they just need to continue the performance and the reliability.

We primarily use the solution for its use as a bank and commercial solution. We use it for core banking and for day-to-day work on the DBA, the database.

The performance is the solution's most valuable asset. It has one of the highest levels of performance I have ever seen. It's quite remarkable, in that sense.

The memory is great. We can have a huge amount of memory. However, the main reason to work with the solution is the performance, since inter-servers cannot be compared with the cores of both systems.

The PowerVC make it so simple since we can deal with it just like VMware, just like virtual machines, and it's really simple.

The solution is currently working on the old PowerVCs. We welcome this improvement.

It would be ideal if the solution was more simple to work with. 

The initial setup is difficult.

I've been dealing with the solution for about two years now.

I haven't found the solution to have any stability problems. I don't think I can recall dealing with bugs or glitches that disrupted our work. The system doesn't freeze or crash. It's quite reliable and offers great performance.

Scaling the solution is possible and would be quite easy. Companies that need to scale up can do so with this IBM product.

We've had to reach out to technical support in the past. The level of service they offer has been quite good. We've been very happy with them so far.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's quite complex, especially for those implementing it for the first time. While it will never be simple, per se, it does get easier the more setups you end up performing.

A non-tech person would simply not be able to handle the implementation. You will need someone that's knowledgable.

Not just the implementation, but the registration, and many other parts of the deployment take a rather long time. It's not a quick process. If we're just talking about the installation with servers, you are looking at four or five days right there. However, if you factor in migration or other administrations, you are looking at a one to three-month deployment timeframe.

We're partners. We have a business relationship with IBM.

I'd advise others considering the product that, while it is pricy, you can't beat the performance you get on it.

I'd recommend the solution for big databases and high-performance applications.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If it wasn't so complex, I'd give the solution higher marks. Most people nowadays look for simplicity and they want to have non-technical people deal with everything, just like a cloud solution. However, you need someone specialized in order to handle it.

While the solution is quite expensive, the level of service provided is second to none. It makes it worth the price.

We tend to use the on-premises deployment model as cloud versions are not very popular in Jordan.

We primarily sell the solution to clients.

It just works. I don't know how else to explain it. We don't have a lot of issues with it. It handles our enterprise systems well.

Performance. We run our financial environment on it and there are key dates you always have to hit. Performance is key there, when we close the quarters and the like. You can't risk missing dates for getting your numbers to the street.

I could see a benefit in some organizations if licensing were more cloud oriented. We're not big in the cloud yet. I guess at some point that would probably help.

Pricing has room for improvement. It's definitely more competitive now than it was. That was an issue we had a while back where you'd look at the cost and it was just so much more for it. It was a hard sell.

No issues.

No issues.

Support is good. I think it used to be much better. Sometimes it takes too long to get to the right person. You have to go through too many levels to get to the person you need, that has that skill set. I understand that, there's level-three, and you have to escalate and it takes time.

Straightforward.

We have been seeing a return on investment in the moves from version to version due to better performance and they cut the licensing costs down. 

It was only Power for the most part. We started with it a long time ago. The rest of our environment runs on Linux, SUSE and Redhat for application web servers.

We use it for AIX. We actually just got P850s but they were refreshed.

I consider IBM to be a market leader in the server industry but to maintain that position pricing is the main thing, to be able to compete with Linux. It's difficult on x86. But on the side of trying to sell it to management, they just look at costs a lot of the time and it's a tough sell; they don't really deal with the reliability of the system's performance.

I like the processor speed. I don't think that there's a match for it out there. I like the use of the Hypervisor and the VIO functions that you can utilize. I just don't think that there's anything out that matches it, and it's easy to implement.

The flexibility of it, being able to run multiple OS's on it. I can run Linux on it, I can run i on it, I can run AIX on it, and it's all on the same physical hardware. Being able to do that, it just gives us a lot of flexibility in that area.

I know that they are doing a lot with Linux, so maybe a more direct way of converting to Linux on some applications; some way to actually sell it a little bit better. Because you still get into the expense of going to the Power hardware, but if you're already on the Power hardware, I don't see the issue. A lot of people just don't seem to want to progress onto Linux, but they want to keep Linux on the Wintel or Intel devices. And to me, you just don't get the chips and the ability of the chips that you get on AIX, and on the Power hardware.

We've been using Power since I've been with the company. I've been there 16 years. 

AIX is very stable. Our whole Power system has been very stable. We very rarely have outages. Most of the outages have not been attributed to the hardware, it's more attributed to network or SAN. 

Now we have had some hardware outages, but those are based on doing maintenance such as firmware upgrades, and the like. Those have caused issues, but you know when those are happening because you've already had them scheduled. So you know to be prepared for it, what work will be done.

We have not had any issues with our scalability.

Technical support is good. When you find the right people, they are very knowledgeable. But you have to know to get the right one, you have to explain your issue properly, that way you can get to the right person.

I feel upgrades are straightforward, especially the AIX upgrades. Because, unlike with Windows, you have all the small fix packs, most of the time you're either doing a major TL or a service pack. I feel that that is much easier than having to go through doing all of the small pieces.

In terms of the upgrades of AIX and the Power from the 7 to the 8, I did see a return of the investment because we have a small Oracle data base running on some of our apps. To be able to take it from the POWER7 where you're using .1 CPU - this is just in development - that you could take it down to .05 CPU and double the number of LPARs that you have, that is a very good feature.

We do have a lot of Wintel as well, so it's more of a mix and match. Yes, other things have been considered. We went with IBM because we have been with IBM hosting, and one of our main apps is running on AIX. We would have to do a lot to convert it. So it seems to be running fine where it is.

We're running on POWER7s and POWER8. We started with POWER4, and moved up. In fact, we started with 7028s and 7013s at one time. We've been in the business a good while. We're using it for AIX and now we're using it for i as well.

I think the Power system uniquely positions our company with the speed it has, and the processing power. I think it keeps our app running at a maximum output, and that keeps the company running better.

I do consider IBM to be a market leader. I would say for them to maintain it, to me, I don't like the thing of following the trend of everybody, everybody's trying to go in this direction, that direction. I feel like sometimes you can just improve on your product, and that will increase your market share, versus following the trend of everyone else.

• The Live Partition Mobility (LPM) feature.
• The virtualization feature.

Depending on the simplified remote restart for the DR, that's what we're looking forward to.

It has improved the stability of the Oracle database. We have a big database running in a Power environment and it is more stable than compared to what we are adding.

I would say the cost. They need to work on the cost because I think it's quite expensive and that's a changing trend in the industry, to be more focused on the product.

I started using Power when I started at T-Mobile three years ago. They had POWER5, and we migrated them to POWER6. So it has been about three years, maybe a little longer.

For the scalability, we do have the capacity planning and we do plan accordingly and I think we would go for POWER9 if we had to, depending on the usage. I think there is still scalability room for us.

I think T-Mobile has a big shop of Intel for Linux servers and they have Power for AIX servers.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup because we have an SME who does that and I'm just an engineer at the back end. I do the operations support, so that's where I come into the picture.

We do see ROI from the move from POWER7 to POWER8. We do capacity management and we are able to move quite a lot of workload.

Would I prefer a license based on a cloud system?

We have Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and that's more for the application side. I haven't dug into this more to check how the database would do on the cloud so I'm not sure about that.

We are using AIX with POWER8 but we do have a mix of POWER7 servers as well. 

We do capacity planning, and we try to maintain the Power capacity monitoring and to maintain that we've got enough capacity for a year worth of workload. We plan ahead as well for the coming workload. What we've got is enough for one more year.

What is there not to like about it? It works every time. You hardly ever have any real issues. It's fast, the most efficient hardware I've ever worked with. I like Power because I think it just works the best.

You absolutely have to get that better performance all the time. The managers are always saying, "Well, let's make it faster, faster, faster."

I've been using Power since the birth of Power. I've been in it for 24 years. When I first started it was all Micro Channel and I've been along through the evolution right up through to the POWER8s and new, coming POWER9s. I've ever only been interested in working with IBM products.

We're using it for AIX and we also are setting up some SAP HANA on some 870s. 

Everyone has an issue at some point, but over the 24 years I've been in this, I have seen very few issues, which is why I really like their product over everyone else.

Scalability has always been kind of a key factor. There's no good product if it's not scalable, and Power is the easiest-to-scale product I've ever worked with.

Depends on which technical support you get. With all the different places I've been you really get the Advocate Program or you don't. If you're in the Advocate Program you get the top help right away. Their tech support with the Advocate Program is awesome.

If you're not in the Advocate Program you have to go through the series of the lower-level tech support, and usually they're not really helpful. In most cases I've ended up figuring out what the problem was before they had an answer. 

Regarding upgrades they're generally pretty straightforward. We use NIM to do our upgrades. All you do is create your new lpp_source SPOT and, if you're going from version to version, use nimadm and alt disk - you've got it covered.

We have a Linux team does all the Linux, but we're working with them to help them install the Linux.

In terms of a return on investment from upgrading from a previous version of AIX to the current version, from a financial standpoint I don't really see a difference.

But for performance, it's not so much just the performance, it's the new features that come in the code that makes it appealing to me.

Regarding their being a market leader, I think they've always been in front of all their competitors. Maybe if they made some of their web components a little easier to utilize, that would make me happier.

Primarily the reliability. I can set up a system and it runs until we decide to get rid of it.

The reliability is one. We have a lot of extra redundancy built into Power and we run our critical applications on there so it protects our brand and our business.

Since POWER4.

We are very happy with the performance.

No, we have not.

It's very good. They are knowledgeable and there is always a point of contact.

POWER8 definitely handles the workload better than POWER7 did, as far as the threading between having a lot of partitions running in a system. There is less impact when the system doesn't bog down, when a lot of applications are running.

Licensing is not an issue but it is something that we are being asked for from our leadership. Because usage fluctuates all the time, they want to know that they are only paying for what they are using. And we're all competing against the cloud vendors now.

No. We have been running on Power ever since we went to SAP.

I am using POWER8 for AIX and Linux.

I wouldn't say that Power uniquely positions our company in the industry. We run all of our internal applications on it and we keep our business running with it.

As far as IBM being a market leader, I would think that they are certainly one of the players, I don't know if they are the leader or not. In order to be a market leader I think IBM would have to get into more shops and get the word out there. It's kind of like the Windows mentality, a lot people go with what they know or what they see advertised.