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.

I can get more work done with less hardware. The SMT that they've improved has really helped open up boundaries for other applications that can use it. The ones that can't, they're still single-threaded, still waiting on the CPU cycle.

When using it with the virtualization, we've finally gotten to the point of being able to do what VMware VirtualCenter does, but we do it more robustly, a lot faster and probably easier.

I don't know yet. We have got scalability, resiliency. We can move it from one system to another.

Licensing is always going to be a problem, because it used to be based on, "This is a CPU, this is the memory, this is your footprint." Now, with virtualization, that one CPU can be carved up 100 different ways, so why should I be charged for that use rather than a single CPU, a single socket? But businesses have to make money.

I have been using Power for maybe 15 years; POWER8 since it came out, a couple of years ago.

No we haven't. We pushed it as far as it could go. There have been times I've put maybe 60, 70 machines on a single POWER8 box which, with the poll sharing and the resource sharing, you can do but you have to actually plan it out accordingly.

It's like any other support organization. You can get some top-notch people, and then you can get some who you have to escalate. If you don't escalate, you're not going to get the support that you need. But overall, response has been pretty good.

Intel was the previous solution. The performance wasn't there. Linux on Power, I believe they're one of the first implementers on it. I think that was under POWER4, when no one knew anything about it. But it worked, worked beautifully. The hard part was I couldn't move that workload from one machine to another because it wasn't available. But it's a lot more robust now.

With Intel, it's a matter of complicated instruction set versus reduced. Using Power we get more scalability, more power, less need for resources, hardware, etc.

It's not as easy as clicking boxes and setting up Windows. You have to actually do a lot of pre-planning, a lot of figuring out whats your workload is, what your footprint is, your memory size.

You can get a person who has never seen it before to be able to do it themselves. With the cloud offering, it's point and click, literally. The resources are there. They tell it what they want, where they want it, how much they want, and click, they have a machine.

I mostly use AIX along with some Linux, POWER8 and POWER7.

It's hard to say how the Power system uniquely positions our company in the industry because we try to do everything. But we usually try to push the Power first. Our company mainly started with strictly iSeries, so you can't run that on Intel. So when Power came out and showed that it was a much better workhorse for the iSeries, it was good. Life was great. Actually, I believe iSeries was virtualizing long before Intel even thought about it. But some of the iSeries guys will tell you, "We don't know what it is."

Regarding the OpenPOWER Foundation, it has offered us a faster way of deploying multiple systems in a shorter amount of time. In the good old days, it would take you a few days just to create one system. Nowadays, you can possibly deploy 10 in the time it would take one.

I consider IBM a market leader in the server sector, compared to Dell and Lenova, because, they have more robust, faster hardware that can be deployed and implemented a lot faster than Intel, even with VMware.

VMware has point and click, but there's a real steep learning curve in your networking, your shared resources, your performance tuning and your troubleshooting.

In order to remain a market leader I would say that IBM needs to stay ahead of the curve. They need to listen to what their customers are saying as far as, "I want this feature or that feature." If it can be done, do it. If it can't, let the customer know. "Hey, we'll look at it and get it in the future."

I would definitely recommend Linux on Power rather than Intel.

I would say the converged feature. You can have all of your storage, your processing, your database, everything in the one platform, and all under IBM. That's the best part of it. 

It has helped them improve in a lot of ways. It has improved their efficiency as well as their scalability, from a growth perspective. They want to add more servers, more processing power, things like that. They can be much more easily done now.

I would say that in general we would prefer it if the software was more transparent, in terms of how you are using it. 

Right now it depends on the level of the system and how much more you might have to pay for the same software. And being a cloud provider, we get into a lot of situations where our customers might need just a fraction of a processor, but they still have to pay for a bigger portion of the software costs.

We have been providing this for the last 15 years.

Upgrading from POWER7 to POWER8 was not a big deal. It was pretty straightforward, I would say. Going from version 5.4 to a 6, that was more of a challenge, but now it is pretty stable. We have some partitions running 7.3, some running 7.2 version. All over the map.

Scalability is great. With the VIOS, the Power and the Power platform, we can virtualize. We can create many more LPARs.

It is definitely a more flexible solution, compared to earlier versions. You want to be able to cater to multiple customers on one particular system. We have dozens of systems running in our environment right now.

Back in the day, it used to be more hardware-centric. Now, with the software version, it is much easier for us to create multiple partitions. We may run a POWER8 system with 20 cores, and we could have, maybe, 30 customers on that one box by slicing and dicing it. So it is pretty good, from that perspective.

We are the service provider and so we have the IBM i at every level in the cloud. This is pretty much due to the demand from the customers. It's not us, it's really our customers asking for it.

We also work with other solutions. We do everything; we do Windows, Linux, AIX, as well as IBM i. All different platforms. 

Compared to Intel, Power is a much more stable solution. Security is also much better. Compared to the other platforms, Power definitely has more capabilities.

There are not many companies in the US who can provide the IBM i platform in the cloud so we are uniquely positioned in being able to cater to that particular requirement of our customers.

I would consider IBM to be a market leader from the Power side, but not in other areas. I think they were getting there but they made a big mistake by selling the PureFlex to Lenovo.

• AIX
• Reliability
• Performance, of course
• The ease of use
• It's really enterprise ready (whereas Linux is less enterprise ready)
• I would say that the best feature right now of Power is the license management. We use it for Oracle and WebSphere and it's good for that. As I said the reliability of the AIX OS and hardware is very good.

The only thing that I've seen over the last years - and I think it's getting better - would be to have stable service packs. Often I upgrade to a new version, a new service pack, and we need to put iFix over the service pack. I would like to have the service pack be really stable, or IBM saying, "This service pack is stable, but you should add this and this iFix as of right now." That would be better.

It would be an improvement if the cost went down, as well.

Mature and stable.

Great, but at our company we don't need the scalability that AIX and Power offer, so we are kind of in the medium range of requirement.

Good, and a lot better than other companies.

I would say pretty straightforward.

Mainly performance and flexibility is getting better and better. So I would say yes, slowly but steadily, we are seeing a return on investment of the expense in upgrading from the previous versions to the version we're using now.

We use a competitor, Intel-based Linux. We went with Power because of reliability, performance; it's a good product overall.

When I rated it 10 out of 10, I ignored the pricing. It's costly, so it's part of the business decision. Hardware prices put the brakes on some solutions.

I don't consider IBM to be a market leader in servers. They are in a very good position, but AIX is not sold to customers, it's not viewed as a prime solution.

I think they need to push more AIX, openly, there's not enough noise about it. It's quiet, it works, so we don't talk about it. It's a local initiative it's not a global initiative.

• 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.

I think the main thing that POWER8 is doing for the industry in general is it's leap frogging all the other technologies that exist out in the market from a performance capacity and total cost of ownership point of view. You can scale these servers up or scale out and replace a lot of footprint for other organizations. 

An IBM i customer is more of a traditional business, they've been around for a while, they've been running on IBM i for, maybe, a couple decades and for them it's all about being able to continue to move forward, maybe even scale down the size of the server, the footprint of the server, the energy consumption and all those things that come along with it.

Help Systems is a provider of IBM i and AIX systems management software. We use the server in our infrastructure to develop technology to solve customers' problems in automation. We're using POWER7 and POWER8 servers, highly partitioned, virtualized; using SAN storage to help us build up our development environments.

Our solutions include the top issue of the day which is security. Everybody's concerned about security, so we do that. We do automation software, which we've been doing for years, and then monitoring software also.

From a software developer standpoint, virtualization is really the key, as we can more easily spin up a new partition, virtual instance of IBM i. We can have it preloaded with our different softwares that we need to test out. To me it's a virtualization. We use that through having a SAN and POWER8 technology.

With POWER it has everything that we need from a scale up and scale out capacity, capability to stick lots of work and footprint on it. For IBM, the challenge that everybody has in the industry, and in the processor world, is that we've kind of hit the "knee" of the curve with Moore's law. Processors aren't getting faster. The neat thing about IBM is the innovation that they're doing to offload work from the processor and do more simultaneous things. 

I'm really excited about the artificial intelligence even if you don't always think of systems management companies like us being excited about that technology. But we have a lot of information too, and helping our customers more easily mine that - I see some great opportunities. 

And to better manage heterogeneous footprints of all the different operating systems that are out there across one common interface.

When we talk about cloud licensing, or maybe tenant-based licensing, definitely there's a shift in the marketplace in that more of our customers are looking at things like infrastructure as a service, where they're going to be having their IBM i footprint hosted by somebody else, maybe on somebody else's partitioning. Sister partitioned systems. So then licensing does become an issue in how do we take that on-prem customer perpetual license and convert it into something that they can consume as they go, because people are used to that with Amazon and other technologies.

The stability and scalability is why you invest in IBM i. You don't have issues. Like any organization, we have some other applications that run on non-IBM i stuff and to say that it's as reliable - it's not. With IMB i you know it's there, you don't even think about, "Is the server available? Is my application available?" It's always available. 

I travel around visiting hundreds of customers every year and it's the same story. We don't have a problem. I was at a customer a couple weeks ago and they talked about that IBM i had been running for over a decade without any outage, until somebody was in the back room moving some wires around, a new electrician in the company, and they accidentally turned off the wrong switch. And then they had some outage. 

But it's human error that causes the problem. It's not the system itself, it's not the operating system or the hardware that's a problem. 

Going from POWER7 to POWER8, the big thing to me is it's not even necessarily the performance, it's the capability of virtualizing, more easily done through some of the different technologies that we have so it can spin up new environments more easily.

Today's world is more about the applications that we have. So, the challenge for the IBM i customer is staying up with time. We have to modernize. We've been talking about it for years - modernizing the applications - so that when my daughter or my son comes and works for you, they're working on a browser type interface. They're not using a green screen interface. That's probably the biggest challenge for IBM i customers. 

To a certain extent that's probably true in AIX too. We don't have enough of the web user, graphical-type interfaces that are on this platform that keep people around because they think green screen, they think old. Reality is, they might be running a green screen but the infrastructure behind it is POWER8, running SAN storage, SSD, flash technology. It's probably virtualized and they don't even realize it. But it's quite a powerful system and quite a highly modernized system in the background.

Linux on POWER is another good opportunity for customers because all of a sudden you wake up one day and you have 500 Intel-based Linux servers in your datacenter and if only you would have known that you could have invested in one POWER server, or two POWER servers, and scale that down to only a few instances of Linux on POWER. Think about the power. To me it's just simple math. Whenever you have 2,000 or 500 or 300 servers trying to manage a business, there's just more that's going to go wrong. And so if you can scale up with the Linux on POWER, that's the way to go.

Regarding the OpenPOWER Foundation, at first I was kind of skeptical. I thought, "Okay, well what does that mean to an IBM i customer or an AIX customer?" But what it means is that IBM is spending an enormous amount of time working on technology that's going to take us and make things like artificial intelligence, and the Watson, and all those things a little more commonplace. 

And for all organizations, we all have more information than what we know what to do with. If we can better harvest that and predict our customers' trends and purchases, were going to be so much farther ahead than the competition. And if you're doing it on IBM i you'll be able to do that with a fairly small cost of ownership, to get into some really big super-computer type technology to do that. 

So the open source thing as part of that brings on some new players that are helping IBM to invest. Obviously IBM is a business and if they're buying up POWER9, and if I have to wait for a POWER9 processor because some large open-source type consortium partner is buying that POWER9 technology, that's good for IMB i and AIX customers because it makes the POWER server itself a very viable economic decision for IBM too.

It's unfortunate, market wise, POWER is not known as well. But the total cost of ownership, IBM's done a great job of lowering the price to entry and then the scalability, security, and reliability. I mean it's second to none in the IT world.

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent. They're usually knowledgeable.

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

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

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

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

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

The new thing which we have brought is LPM. Although it was available with POWER7 as well, but that does help us out a lot.

Honestly, the customer is always happy if he gets good performance.

I would like to have some stats where the CPU is getting utilized and to see how much of the actual CPU I'm using. It's like hypervisor stats which I should be getting.

Also, if I could get a similar thing on a cloud, so I could switch from cloud to datacenter, datacenter to cloud. It should have that flexibility somewhere.

About three years.

No, we've never had any issue in terms of stability. It's always better. We don't see unexpected outages. So, that's the best thing.

It's good. We normally have them for problems with the hard drive, and for the software it is also fine.

Some of our colleagues that attended the conferences, they were excited about the new features, that's the reason we brought the POWER8 into our system.

I don't think we know IBM initial setup because we have some colleagues working for a long time and they have much experience with this kind of set up.

It was straightforward.

We have done testing with Intel, we have done testing with POWER, and the performance we were getting with POWER is actually very good compared to what we were getting on the other systems. So that's the actual background.

Majorly, what we have is on POWER8. We have POWER systems, we others for development and testing, environment hosted, but all the production is majorly on POWER8.

Currently, I see IBM as a market leader in the server sector. And I see, there are a lot of other options that are coming, such as cloud-based, AWS and the like. We are people who like to test and see if we keep the same thing for a longer period on the market.

To continue to be a market leader, I personally think IBM should be on the cloud, more in the cloud space. That is something that they should do much faster now.