IBM Power Systems Reviews

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.

I think that it's reliability and availability. Also, the ability to scale and do some of the newer things with replication, with the storage. They help the Power to really stand out.

For me, personally, I've been around Power, IBM i, since it was System/38. It's been a long time. Personal knowledge of it is my strength. I can relay that into solutions for our customers.

For the i customers, I think that Power, the horsepower, has always been there. So, I would like to see something more on the lower end, where they would make it more cost effective for the small guy, rather than the big guy.

They need to work a little bit more with the smaller guys. Help to make it easier for them to move, to get going into the system. They need to be a little bit more competitive with the Intels of the world.

I think they still claim "five 9s" availability. I would have to agree. In my experience, starting out as a CE back in the day, they were always very reliable, very easy to fix when they did break. With some of the other RAS things that they've put into these boxes, they're the best.

The scalability is the great thing. You go from very small systems, mom-and-pop shops, to Fortune 100 companies. That's the biggest thing, the scalability.

We have worked with tech support for issues that have arisen. Sometimes, it's not really hardware related. A lot of times it's code related, but they're always very responsive and able to resolve the problems quickly.

In terms of the upgrade from different versions, I think after we got past the jump from Syst ARIS, back in the day; and then, when we went from versions like 6 to 7, or 5.4 to 6, those were the really tough versions. 

Now, the version upgrades are very smooth.

We do see return on investment by upgrading from version to version.

I don't think that it's so much power, speed; it's the feature functionality. Some of the newer things that you are able to do with the newer versions, more so than the old days, when it was, "We get X amount of speed." That doesn't happen as much as the new features that are available.

For example, some of the Java things they're doing. Some of the things security-wise, there are a lot of great enhancements.

We are strictly IBM.

We go with Power Systems because the reliability and the availability of the systems are key. They are the best systems, as far as reliability and availability go.

We are a business partner, so many of our customers use different versions from 5.4 up to 7.3. Most use IBM i. We do have customers that run POWER8, but we have other customers that are running on POWER5, POWER6. We're trying to get them to move to POWER8.

I would say IBM is a market leader in the server industry. It's hard because, for what my company does, as a business partner, we're not really placing too many new servers. But the customers we have are very loyal and very committed to the platform. I think that, as long as IBM takes care of the customers that they have - there is no better customer than the one you have - take care of those customers and they'll be fine.

The Power hardware is rock-solid and reliable. You can't really ask for better hardware support, software support and reliability of the equipment. It is very powerful for what it does. 

From a reliability standpoint it has provided us with excellent performance. 

We are in retail and we can't send technical people out to retail locations. We have to have a system that is very reliable, that will basically run 24/7, 365. In some cases, we have had the same chassis in a location for 10 years. For the most part, it takes its normal fans and power drives and power supplies, but it's the same chassis that has been sitting there running. That's why we continue to purchase IBM and Power equipment.

The Power Systems can oftentimes be a tough sell because it is much more expensive than Commodity X86 hardware. But it's not a dollars and cents kind of thing. It's the fact that we don't spend dollars and cents. It's the reliability. The fact that we've been able to use the same procedures and processes in our stores for so long is a huge benefit.

We are a special case, because what we want is the cheapest Power box we can get in all of our locations. That is not the way the industry is moving.

Cloud would be a great option, if you didn't get the worst internet connections in the world in very remote locations. That's where we are in a kind of unique situation. We have to have the processing power at a location, but we don't have the luxury of a good internet connection. In some cases, we have DSL. That goes down for days. You can't have a Cloud-based solution. You have to have something that can process on-site and retain and then batch upload data.

The lack of software vendors moving onto the platform, as opposed to fleeing the platform, is an issue.

I have been using Power since the early 90's. Right now I'm using version 4, all the way up to 7+. I'm using it for AIX. I would definitely be interested in upgrading to POWER8 in the future, but it comes down to cost. It's always cost, especially in retail.

We transitioned not too long ago from POWER6 to POWER7 equipment. Literally, it was just moving the Powers from one system to another. There were no questions about compatibility, it was just a move from here to here. You take care of some base prerequisites and you are done.  

OS upgrades are non issues. You just do them. Typically, we're only doing them because a vendor or an application needs it, but they work. Often there is very little downtime and no need to roll back, it just works. The same can't be said for a lot of the competitors' products.

Both software and hardware support are wonderful. They are very responsive and knowledgeable. We deal with the field service technicians, the IBM CEs all the time. Usually it takes only one visit to fix the problem, which is huge. They get stuff done. 

Whereas, with some other two-digit vendors, two-letter vendors, that is not the case. In fact, we even saw discrepancies between IBM's Power and Lenovo's x86 support structure. We've actually moved some of our x86 systems away from Lenovo because the support structure isn't as good as what we were used to.

Setup was a non-issue. The upgrades are complex, but it's easy to figure out what you have to do.

Power certainly isn't a great value proposition. A lot of that has to do with the fact that everybody else in our industry, from a software or maintenance standpoint, is moving away from it. 

Because of the cost I am rating them a six.

It is designed for a large workload, as opposed to a small workload. For our circumstances, and even as an independent, I can't buy a Power system to experiment on. It can't happen. You cannot buy them.

Even if you can buy them, I don't have $6000 to $10,000 to drop on a toy.  As far as I know, there is no enthusiast. There is no developer world to do that. You either have to have a big, massive system working for a corporation or you don't touch it. It's a non-starter, as far as open source software is concerned. Either you're doing it for a business, or it's not happening. That's when there are huge problems.

I consider other options all of the time but it's simpler to just keep going with what we have. 

We also like what Power does. It's very reliable and very powerful. And because of the code compatibility we are able to run the same programs today that we did back in 1992. That has a lot to do with it. There is no cost to upgrade the software side of things. It's just a hardware upgrade, in some cases.

Ten or 15 years ago, software would have been written. There would have been Linux and Power, and maybe Windows, but nowadays it's Linux or it's the Cloud. You can run Linux on Power, but not for what these clients want. They want x86. They want Intel software, Red Hat or centOS on x86. 

Our software vendors, at least in our retail locations, are moving away from supporting Power. In fact, I'm shocked that they do some days. Whereas, our datacenter loads, those stay the same. Those are still going to be continuing to run what they are, because most of the major players, database systems and ERP systems, still continue to support Power.

I would not consider IBM to be a market leader in terms of servers. The reason is because if you go around and you ask people about a server, they don't talk about IBM. Maybe 10 years ago they did, but now it's HP. It's maybe Lenovo and it's Dell.  When you start talking servers, people don't think IBM. They think x86. That's where IBM dropped the ball, in some regards, because why would I think of them?

I can't buy them. I can't get them on the used market. I can't run them. I can't develop software for them. Though it's a different situation when you talk about the Cloud. That's when people tend to think more about IBM.

We like the virtualization, PowerVM, the live partition mobility, and dynamically adding the processors and the memory. Also AIX. The beauty of AIX is really something to be admired. AIX is a very useful operating system. The volume management is really good.

I have been using POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, and then we transferred onto POWER8. We really have reduced our billing cycles from days to hours. 

Secondly, it is really good for billing jobs. It is reducing our time. We used to do billing in multiple days, now have reduced it to hours. That's great.

The HMC and PowerVM need a more catchy graphical interface. 

Secondly, the command line interfaces should be converted into graphical interfaces. It is such a complex thing in making LPARs when you are using it through a wire server. It should be easy rather than be complicated. I'll give an example of the graphical interface. The V7000 is really great. Anyone can use it, there's no complexity in there. PowerVM and the VIOS interfaces should be like the V7000.

Every two years we have to buy a new server. It is kind of complex, because we have to compare it with Oracle servers. We have to do RFPs. We have to service both the servers, both the technologies, and then everything goes under pricing.

We continuously engage with IBM for different service requests. 

It's good. There are a few different kinds of support available in our area, Premium Services and the Remote Services. We usually use the Remote Services. We just open a ticket and give them the logs and they give us a solution.

They are helpful.

No. We are already invested in IBM, so we won't go towards anything else. We have lots of investment in IBM equipment. We are certified with IBM equipment as well as for hardware and software support by IBM.

We have been using IBM the last 15 years or so, and the performance that IBM servers are giving us is really good. Secondly, in our geographical area, it's the support. IBM has got good support. And the workloads we do have in our environment, IBM has got the equipment which can handle those workloads.

Regarding upgrades it's a tricky game. It's a complex thing, because in our environment when something is running smoothly we don't want to stop it or give it downtime. We try to keep it running as long as we can. So in this way we sometime miss the upgrades, we don't upgrade it. But we are now focusing on the upgrades in a timely manner, rather than waiting for years and years. We are working on that.

My rating of nine out of 10 is for the hardware. However, the software still has lots of issues. For example, we need to upgrade the software very frequently, so I'd give it seven out of 10.

In Pakistan, IBM is a market leader, and to maintain that position the main thing is support. If the support guys are good - the people who are managing the accounts for enterprise organizations - are good they are very much in contact with the organization, keeping it informed about the new technologies and the new offerings. These certainly can help in keeping IBM's position right now in the server industry.

I think the biggest driving factor for the bank is the cost, the cost-performance profile, it's better than anything else.

If you virtualize, Power hardware allows you to oversubscribe CPUs, and we take a big advantage of that for the bank. We save the bank millions of dollars by oversubscribing, because we have probably 700 DevOp servers, where they develop software. The developer might have 40 or 50 servers. They don't run them all at the same time, maybe three or four of them do. So we give those 40 or 50 servers just a couple of CPUs. We way oversubscribe. In fact, IBM-ers raise their eyebrows when we tell them our oversubscription rate.

The virtualization. Power was the first solution to have it. Now everybody does virtualization, like VMware, etc. But Power was there a long time before everybody else. 

We virtualize everything, we're about 95% virtual. The virtualization and the quality you get from it is one reason we like the solution.

Regarding new features, we like where it's going. I really can't think of something newer that they are not currently working on.

Except for Power on Linux. The licensing for software products, including IBM's products - it costs you more to run Linux on Power than it does AIX. That's something I would like to see them improve. We would like to go to Power Linux, but all the software that we are using - and I'm talking like IBM software, like Webster - they don't let you oversubscribe the software. It's not cost effective.  

If you didn't know better, if you didn't do these things, you probably wouldn't care and you would put Linux on Power. But if you take advantage of some of these real advanced features, for oversubscribing as an example, it's not supported on Linux on Power. So that stops us, in particular, from going that way.

Stability is great. The old saying was, you talked about the "five 9s" of reliability. We're at something like seven 9s. We've never really had a major outage. 

We've had outages, but it was the network that went down, or a SAN outage, or somebody, a person, pushed the wrong button. But the infrastructure itself, the IBM Power hardware has never failed us.

No issues. And we take advantage of that scalability. I have a few frames where we have over 200 servers on a frame.

We have IBM support. We are a big IBM user. In fact, we use their support for Middleware. They're excellent.

I'm not a good person to ask. This is what I do. To me it's easy, I think it's easy to learn. I think the one problem new people have is - and this isn't just something that relates to IBM - the phraseology is different. So something in VMware might mean something different in the Power world. The lingo, there's some new jargon, and new acronyms that you have to learn. But once you get around that, you realize this thing is the same as this other thing on another system; just a different word.

In terms of a move from version to version, and the return on investment from a move from POWER7 to 8, or from 5 to 6, I would say the software has gotten friendlier, more robust, easier to use, easier to upgrade. I think the advantages you get from going to POWER6, POWER7, POWER8 are a bigger thing than going from AIX 6 to 7.

On the hardware side the upgrades are great. With POWER8 we picked up SMT8, and that made a big improvement. If you have applications that can take advantage of it - we run mostly IBM software - so of course the software is enabled.

The cost model is great. There is so much built in to the technology, that if you know how to use it you can save yourself a lot of money. Again I'll go back to what I said earlier: We're saving millions of dollars on software cost by oversubscribing. I know a lot of other users that don't do that. Either they don't understand how some of the technology works, or they're afraid to try it. All the advanced features that are built into this platform we use.

To start out, I actually put the first Power systems in the bank. The first applications we were using, they only ran on Power. There's one application, that we call "wire transfer" - banks use that to transfer money to the Federal Reserve - and it only runs on AIX Power. That's what really got us going. Then, over time people realized it was a better. We used to be an HPE shop and over time we proved that we were better than HPE, and we just retired our last HPE server.

We're on all versions of Power. We just retired a POWER4 box, but we have POWER5, 6, 7, and 8. We have all these versions primarily because we're a bank, and we have a lot of old applications. It's hard to get people to upgrade their applications so we can upgrade their hardware. We use it strictly for AIX.

We're running about 1200 servers right now. I have a couple old POWER5 and POWER6 frames, as I said previously, but most of our stuff is on POWER8. We have about 18 870 enterprise servers, and that is where the bulk of our stuff is. We are trying to get everything over to the newer stuff.

Power uniquely positions our bank in the industry because we are almost 100% virtualized, so we're cloud-ready, if you will. In fact, we view our AIX environment as a private cloud at the bank. That is one of the big things. 

And the Power solution is a lot more customizable that many of the others. We have some unique infrastructure things at the bank that it fits perfectly.

In terms of some people saying they want less "green screen," less command line, they're talking about UNIX, and historically UNIX is a command-line type of interface, a text interface. We can do a GUI in AIX, and most people don't use it. In fact, the only time you see a GUI is when people are installing software, because Oracle or DB2 has a GUI install interface, so you have to fire up a GUI.

I think IBM is a leader in the server market. I'm an old guy, back when I got into AIX, the Sun servers - the big Sun 10Ks and 18Ks, the HP Superdomes - those were all the enterprise servers, those were the servers of choice. Then came Power AIX, now they're number one. There is no more Solaris. HPE is struggling, they finally quit making their own hardware. They are doing x86. The Power hardware is just so much better than x86 hardware.

We like the resiliency, we like the flexibility, the speed of the processor. 

It brings reliability. Rarely do we have failures.

TCOs is highly competitive, if not always the best, especially if you're running a per-core priced database.

No issues. Very stable.

Highly scalable. No issues scaling.

I'd say they were been better in the past. Obviously it depends who you get. You need to know how to drive your support calls to get maximum effectiveness but, on a one to 10 scale, I'd give them a six.

They could improve responsiveness, ownership of problems, and technical acumen on the first level.

Hardware migrations: logical partition mobility. Move it right onto the next platform.

Software x updates are pretty straightforward. I don't have much experience with i. And Linux is Linux.

In terms of the AIX, we are  definitely seeing a return on investment from moving from original versions of Power to POWER8, in performance. And we're definitely getting a per-core gain by moving to POWER8. In addition, the whole I/O speeds in general are improving.

We've primarily beem a Power shop. There have been other considerations, for x86. We were sing Linux on Intel before Power. We chose IBM because of total cost of ownership. 

It's always been the platform for enterprise applications and go-to production systems that need that sort of reliability to run. 

We're currently working with POWER7 and POWER8. We use it for AIX, IBM i and Linux.

I would absolutely recommend Linux on Power. I believe we're going to expand our use of Linux on Power.

I think IBM is a market leader in servers. To maintain that position I'd say the Open foundations that they've created are a good way of pulling in a broader base of users and technology. Keep improving around those arenas to get better.

Regarding the OpenPOWER Foundation, I think it brings a credibility to the Linux platform, and it allows customers to see that enterprises are serious about using Linux and exploiting its functionalities on Power.

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.