IBM Power Systems Reviews

We are using it for database servers, and performance-wise it is one of the best available servers in the market.

For me, the AIX operating system is one of the best things because I'm a Unix guy and I like the flexibility of the operating system. It's very powerful.

One of the key features is that the performance is among the best. But also on the security side, we get regular security patch updates and system hardening. There are free tools available to harden the system. It's very unique.

One of the features that we would like, and I think they are also adapting to the latest trends in the market, is to make it more open, more flexible. Traditionally the Unix operating system was not very flexible. For example, if you are creating a virtual machine, it is not done the same way you would create it with VMware. With VMware, anybody can create a virtual machine without any knowledge of the server side. But with AIX it's a bit difficult. I think they are already in the process of improving it, making it more flexible and easier to use.

It is very stable. We haven't faced an issue with the servers until now.

It is scalable because the POWER8 server, the CPU allows up to eight or 10 cores. And you can add two more, so that is very good. Even the entry-level server will give you the option to have so many running on the same physical server.

We use the technical support from a local partner of IBM. They are very good. They know the technology very well and they have been highly professional during implementation and with support.

The setup is really straightforward, it's not that complex.

I would recommend, going for this solution, because it is one of the best solutions available in the Unix market now.

I would rate it eight out of 10. The reason is, as I said, the performance and stability, and the security included with the product.

In terms of selecting a vendor, we first go through the product features and evaluate them and see that the product suits our environment. Then, we look at the various product selection criteria, like ease of use and implementation. We also look at the cost, how costly it is to support in the future.

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.

Speaking from the IBM i perspective, it's a very well-integrated database, a well-designed power system. Plus, the Power gives us the performance that we need at a low cost.

I think we are able to run our entire organization on a smaller machine than if we had multiple Intel servers. The software that's available for the Power Systems also gives us our industry edge. 

It does everything that we require though we would like it to be faster.

I would also like to see a small developer model come out that I could purchase on my own to develop application software.

Probably six years. 

We are using POWER7 with IBM i to run our enterprise applications. We have been thinking of upgrading to POWER8, but at this point we are going to wait and just update to the POWER9.

No.

It's definitely scalable. You can go from a small model all the way up to as large as you need to go.

For the most part it's good, when you can get to second-level support. Usually, when you call first-level you get somebody in India who doesn't always know what they're talking about. So generally, you have to escalate it to second-level to get a good response.

We had maxed out our earlier versions, and when we moved to a POWER7 we saw a definite performance increase. It was able to take care of some of the bottlenecks that we were experiencing. In terms of power usage and space it's been great as well.

No, we are staying with the IBM Power Systems. 

I definitely view IBM as a market leader. I think where they fall down is in their marketing, getting their message out to other people. Because not too many people are aware of how great a system the Power is. You've got a lot of competition in the Intel world that somehow seems to get more marketing out there. 

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.

• 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.

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.

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.