IBM Power Systems Reviews

The hardware keeps getting better. We're hoping for a POWER9 announcement here so we can try to roadmap what we're going to buy next.

The backups work great, data recovery works great, and as far as customer innovations, they can connect to us, we can get them what they need, and it gives us the tools to give them what they need.

POWER8 was a huge upgrade. I think we had POWER6s before, and just the I/O and getting the information we need faster to the customers. We had a little saying of "one click, two seconds," get them what they needed, and POWER8 helped us get there to provide that for them.

We're in the insurance industry and we actually moved up in our market share because of it. We started being able to make remote apps that our customers could get to. Then call on that backbone, of that system, and enter information, upload it to us, those types of things, all tied in, that we probably couldn't have done with the POWER6

That's why we came to the IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage Technical University conference, to see what's coming next, to see what we can maybe take advantage of.

Speed. Everyone likes speed. Not that speed has been an issue up until now but you can never be too fast.

I know we have some Windows stuff in-house and I know they have some data deduplication, so I want look at and see some of this newer stuff; we'll take advantage of that. It's something we'd like to see in POWER8. I know some people save stuff in two spots, and then it's four spots, and then it's in 400 spots. And how do you clean that up?

I've been there ten years and they've been using it since before I started.

No issues.

Absolutely none. No issues. I think we added some hard drive space. I was scared at first because I didn't know - I came from a Windows side of the world - thinking, "This is going to be end of days," and it was a none issue. It was really easy.

They're great. They answer the phone, they call me back. Sometimes I get busy and forget to email them back, and they remind me, "Hey, are you still having problems? We're here, whatever you need." And, they're pretty fast, pretty responsive.

The DB2 for the database is our backbone of our system, we run off that for everything, so that's what brought us to POWER. Our web servers point to it, our mapping servers point to it for mapping solutions. Everything points to that and it's what we run off of.

The upgrade from POWER6 was really, really simple. We upgraded the operating system and just did a backup and a restore, or a backup off the old hardware, restore onto the new.

I don't get to look at most of that. It's kind of above my pay scale, but from my understanding, from what I've heard through the grapevine, ROI is there.

We have the POWER8 boxes currently, we have four of them with IBM i OS installed. We currently have two sites and they kind of mirror each other, and then we also use the IBM's Lotus Domino installation for our email.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because no one's perfect; and it's not free. But you also get what you pay for.

I consider IBM a market leader for servers, absolutely, hands down. For our business, we'll probably never not have an IBM box in-house. And I know we just keep doing more and more with it. They keep putting more and more features into it, more stuff for us to take advantage of. I don't know why we would go elsewhere.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

When it comes to reliability, availability and profitability, nothing can beat IBM Power Systems. The machine has great availability and is very serviceable. One can do so many things while the machine is up and running. There is no need to shut anything down. This is how we have been conducting our business for the past few years. 

There are several features which I feel should be added to the solution, including those concerning the graphic processors. 

I am referring to the GPU based machines involved in machine learning. The new systems focus on the part involved in experiencing, but not on machine learning. The product should come with a comprehensive portfolio which will address all the high performance computing requirements, in additiona to machine and deep learning. This is an issue which I raised with IBM. 

Software testing and the compatibility of software products that are available in the market should be addressed. This is an issue we sometimes face, as this particular product is not tested, certified and available in Power Systems. We have lost deals over this. 

The price of the solution could be somewhat better and this is what lowers my rating of it to a seven or eight out of ten. We directly compete with Intel-based products, which several vendors make available, and a price improvement would certainly give us an advantage over the competition. 

I have been using IBM Power Systems for more than 10 years.

I rate the solution as a seven or eight out of ten for its price. As we are talking about a very competitive market, the pricing could be a bit better. This would give us a definite edge over the competition, as we find ourselves in direct competition with Intel-based products, which are available from a number of vendors. 

This system is ideal when it comes to performance and reliability. I don't see any need for improving on its current features and functionality. 

We are resellers of IBM FlashSystem. 

Owing to the issues with its pricing, I rate IBM Power Systems as a seven or eight out of ten. 

The solution is used for defense purposes. It is used in many places, such as banks.

IBM Power Systems are secure and have fast processing.

The solution could improve the memory database for better integration with SAP HANA.

I have been using IBM Power Systems for approximately three years.

The solution is reliable.

IBM offers all business-size solutions. They can offer entry for small, mid-range, and higher-end enterprises solutions.

The solution is easy to scale-out and scale-up.

I have not contacted the technical support of IBM. However, if my customers have issues they contacted IBM directly.

The implementation is straightforward.

IBM does the implementation of the solution for my customers.

The solution does require some maintenance and we provide maintenance services to our customers.

The pricing of the solution is very good because we can beat any other competitor with the pricing. Lately, they have offered good pricing for their customer.

There are different licensing models depending on the user's requirements.

I rate  IBM Power Systems a ten out of ten.

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.