IBM Power Systems Reviews

It's flexible and it's reliable.

They can make it easier to do the patching and iFixes, which is especially important now, with all of the security issues. That would provide a lot of relief.

I recently joined the team, but I think they started moving to Power about a year ago, at least.

We are very happy with Power's performance.

No, absolutely not. Especially now, with the VC, it's even more flexible with the chance to create an environment in a few minutes, especially for testing.

Pretty good. We had a few engagements with the labs.

We have always used Power.

Thanks to the labs, the migration from POWER7 to POWER8 was easy.

We were able to reduce to a single frame.

I don't really wish the licensing was more cloud-based. It is not really an issue. It could be.

I'm using POWER8 right now and migrating some of the POWER7 systems. I am using it with AIX and IBM i. Mostly the core is IBM i. We have an e-commerce website and it is running on AIX.

I don't know how IBM could maintain their status as a market leader in the servers sector, but I would like to see more young people at this kind of event, the IBM Power Conference. That would probably help.

The use case is for hosting a lot of the bank's applications.

Some of the most valuable features are the processing power, stability, and security.

I would like to see the scaling model improved so it's not just either tiny or huge.

We have been using IBM Power Systems since 2001, so it's been 20 years.

IBM is quite stable. That's one of their most popular aspects. We just upgraded our power systems recently, so we're going to be working with them through the next five years at least.

The solution is being used quite heavily.

The scalability is a bit above average. It's not the best, but it's a good deal.

The SKU modeling part they have is not very flexible toward customers. Either you have to go very big or you have to go very small. There isn't an in-between. There's not a lot of variety in this.

I have onsite support and I talk to technical support a lot. My experience has been good.

Setup was straightforward, with the help of the professional services from IBM. Maintenance is handled by the IBM team, especially the hardware.

We used IBM partners. Usually it's IBM themselves, not the partners.

The licensing costs are okay. With IBM Power Systems, it's inclusive, so you can differentiate the price of the hardware from the software itself. The power systems are quite expensive. In the end, you equate a means of value. From a value proposition, it is either justifiable or not.

The additional costs are the maintenance and warranty professional services.

Compared to similar solutions, IBM Power Systems has a proven record. They have their own reputation. You have the availability of technical expertise in the market. They're quite compatible with most of the solutions that we work with.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

My advice for an organization that is looking to implement this solution is that they should have the adequate expertise of personnel that can run the system. They should study their TCO and ROI regarding whether it is worth investing in this, given that it's a very expensive solution. These are the two most important aspects.

I would also advise dealing with an appropriate partner or dealing with IBM directly.

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.

We primarily use the solution for running an ERP. Use cases can go from very small to very big. I'm talking about a hardware device, and therefore it can run all kinds of different software. The virtualization is outstanding. It can go from very, very small to very, very big. We personally use it so that we can use multi-tenancy. 

I can have multiple clients on one server and I can cut it up into tiny pieces. Where a customer would normally have to buy, let's say, one solution for a hundred thousand dollars, instead, they can share that a hundred thousand dollars with five other customers as one customer doesn't actually need a complete server. Clients can share it for cost reasons. 

It's very secure.

I can have what they call multi-tenancy, meaning that I can have multiple tenants within the same server.

The reliability of the solution has been excellent.

The solution is stable.

Technical support is exceptional.

The scalability is very, very good.

I've worked with the solution for a very long time, and therefore, when it comes to the things that it doesn't support, I've accepted that and I understand why they won't. If you asked me what I'd like added, I'd say that it'd be nice if they ran GPUs, however, I know that's not the direction they're going. That said, I would appreciate it if they offered GPU support. 

It used to have it and they pulled it out. That's something that's missing from it, however, there are workarounds.

I've been working with this product for 35 years.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. the security is excellent and the performance is good.

I literally have customers that have a server like this in a cupboard and they don't even know where their server is as it just keeps running.

The scalability on offer is excellent. It's very easy to scale and works well for small to large organizations. 

Technical support is excellent. We have been very happy with the level of service we get. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not complex. A company shouldn't have any issues with the implementation. 

In terms of maintenance, we have a large staff, however, that's necessary due to the fact that we support so many clients. You need an administrator and it depends on how many clients you have, how many administrators you need. For a lot of our clients, we sell them one of these servers, and then we do all the work for them. We install it and then we do the administration. You need the appropriate administrators when you have this product. Small clients may need one administrator, whereas larger ones might need three or four.

We also work with Lenovo.

We are a reseller of IBM and Lenovo equipment. We are on the infrastructure side, mostly on the hardware side.

We sell systems to clients, however, we also have a cloud environment that we sell to clients using that equipment. We always say to customers, we sell what to them what we use ourselves.

We use versions seven to ten.

There are a lot of well-kept secrets to this product that a lot of people are not aware of and do not leverage all of the features that are available on the system. Therefore, if a company is looking to implement this solution, it should do some research. Go to user groups to speak to other users to find out about those well-kept secrets, free of charge.

I'd rate the solution a perfect ten out of ten. It's outstanding. It's so reliable. I have customers that run it that never touch it. It runs for 20 years by itself in a closet. It runs their entire business. 

IBM Power Systems is used for the core banking applications. We have accounts with financial enterprises in Egypt. We propose this solution if you are a bank, you are upgrading or migrating bank applications from Oracle or other vendors, and you would like to have a stable platform in terms of hardware and software.

We value the stability and technology capability of this solution the most. It is very stable, and the processor technology of IBM is very good. When you have a CIO and you are dealing with C-level every day, you can, without any doubt, support the core banking or critical applications with this solution. 

Its management can be made easier because it is not easy to manage. They should also find a new way for migrating from an old Power Systems to a new one. The migration process is currently very complicated.

It should be made easier to scale. Currently, its scalability depends on the initial sizing, whereas in Nutanix HCI, you can add whatever you need and whenever you need it.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is a very stable platform in terms of hardware and software.

Scalability is there, but it depends on the initial sizing. You need to plan for scalability from the beginning because it depends on the series of our systems, processors, and the number of processors that have been activated during the implementation. So, it depends on the sizing, whereas with Nutanix HCI, you can add whatever you need and whenever you need it.

It is usually focused on enterprise customers. In our company, we have around 20 to 25 users. We plan to increase its usage.

I don't contact their support team, but based on the experience of our team, they are usually supportive. Our team doesn't seem to have any issue with IBM technical support. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

I am into sales, and I don't implement Power Systems. Based on the experience of our technical team, the initial set up usually goes smoothly. The issue comes only while migrating from the old one to the new one. For the whole migration, which included the initial setup and testing, it took at least six months.

We upgraded Power Systems from version 7 to version 9, and we worked with the IBM team during the implementation phase. We successfully completed its implementation with their help.

Its price depends on the sizing.

We evaluate Oracle Exadata or Nutanix HCI. For a huge sizing, we go for Power Systems. For a small sizing, we can use an Intel-based solution. Nowadays, some of the core banking applications are moving to the Intel platform, and that's why we are recommending Intel-based solutions, but IBM Power Systems is still a number one solution. It is our preferred platform for core banking applications.

Before starting the implementation, I would advise others to take enough time in planning its implementation, especially the sizing.

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

Flexibility and reliability are the two features that are probably the most important to us.

We get better performance out of our applications, out of our databases running on Power, than we would on anything else that we have looked at.

I think they could use a little more work in the upgrading of the OS, how that could happen as non-interrupting, but I think they are working on that.

Scalability is awesome because we can move from POWER8 to POWER9 when the new servers come out. It allows us to scale out, add new servers underneath it, buy new equipment and add it into the datacenter.

It was pretty straightforward. The partition mobility helps a lot.

We do see a return on that investment, especially on the software licensing, when we are licensing DB2 or we are licensing WebSphere. We have seen that we have had to license fewer cores on the POWER8 than we had on the POWER7.

We've been using more of the mid-range systems than some of the bigger models, and we like that price point. We like where we are at there. It allows us to scale out the datacenter faster. It also allows us to react to a company or an application that's growing faster than someone else.

No. We were an HPE shop and we converted over to Power at POWER5. We thought the Power roadmap was just better, better suited for us.

Using the Power system gives us a leg up. It helps us keep up with the competition.

What we like the best about the POWER8 is that it scaled down in size and power usage. When we were buying POWER5, we had to buy a 16U rack to get 16 cores and maybe a half terabyte of memory. Now I can buy one 4U box with 16 cores and put a terabyte of memory in it, and I'm in business.

We have now started thinking about moving to Linux on Power. We are just starting to scratch that surface.

The ongoing work that is being done behind the scenes, that keep improving the product, logical partition mobility, PowerVM, PowerAIX. I think that all of those help contribute to the way Power is running.

I do consider IBM to be a market leader and in order to remain a market leader they just need to keep improving. Keep improving the product, keep pushing the product. I think it looks great.

We have a problem with the storage software. The media to restore data is also not found. 

I have been working with the product for about five years. 

The product is stable. 

The tool is not scalable and my company has around 5000 users for it. 

We use HPE and Dell servers. We have found that IBM Power Systems require low maintenance compared to others. 

The solution does not require any maintenance. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. The solution is very stable and has no headaches related to maintenance. It is suited for large enterprises. 

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.