IBM Power Systems Reviews

Specifically about System i, it's simple, it's secure, it has a lot of resiliency. As far as I know, we've never been attacked by a virus.

I've been supporting core banking for the past 15 to 20 years directly in Power, and before I was supporting banking in OS/390.

Power systems are compact, their licenses are not as expensive as OS/390, and they fit the banking solution. They're very easy to run and operate for computer operators. They're all menu driven, it's English driven, and you can have different languages. It's a great system. It works for me.

Security is one. But it's a total, comprehensive solution.

It's really good for banking. As a matter of fact, I know many banks that are using AS400s as their back end on Power. It scales a lot, you can just keep on adding frames, you can add on CPUs, you get capacity on demand, you can tune the machine very easily to handle different workloads. It's very efficient, it's secure, it's robust and resilient, you can add on disaster recovery and it's cool.

IBM could perhaps be a bit more aggressive in terms of marketing, and let customers really know that they're out there and can offer a helping hand to move them along, to implement all these great features. Because, in attending the classes here at the IBM Power Conference, over the years, every time they ask, "Are you on this latest and greatest feature?" many people are not there as yet. Yet the feature may have been announced a few years ago. Sometimes it's because companies need to have migration projects, and a bit of money and time to get this going.

IBM could be more aggressive in that area.

I know lab services does a lot of work but systems, if they could include some kind of lab services and bundling of services to get you to the greatest and latest feature at the already included cost... If you include the cost in the base machine, you pay for something once, or it's in your maintenance... because to go and ask for money every time, it's a problem.

Power systems, pretty much since they came out. I've been using AS400 system since the '90s, and I continue to use them, System i.

The upgrade from version to version is not complex. I think it's fairly straightforward and IBM provides a lot of documentation, check-listing, features, so all you've have to do is be methodical, go through the checklists step by step and it's fine.

No issues. If we needed capacity in an emergency, a few years back, we would call IBM if we had a problem. They could turn on a code and we could have an extra CPU. But these days, capacity is in pretty good shape. We have some resources we can move around to give the systems that need it more capacity, and we can move capacity dynamically.

And we know the workloads, so the machine is set to run dynamically. If we need capacity, we get it. We run things and we have all these monitoring capabilities, we monitor stuff, we send alerts and it works fine.

Some of our work is actually outsourced to IBM for the hardware. The hardware works fine, the Power hardware, it's amazing. Years back they had some 10-key disk drives that would tend to fail, but recently disk drives are really much improved, and you can do hot swap. You can pull a drive out, put a new one in.

Apart from disk drives, really and truly you don't see many hardware issues. You may have a power supply that fails, but because of all the redundancy, it's good.

And on the software side, there is hardly a need for support calls. The key is, as long as you're patching very often and you're up to date with the PTFs, it runs pretty well.

In terms of the upgrade from version to version, we see a return on investment, absolutely. There are always features, improvement, SQL and Java; on the hardware, on Power. 

With the technology, when I went from POWER5 to POWER6, I got a something like a 71% increase in horsepower. When I went from POWER6 to 7 I think it was a 20% improvement in CPW. And I believe from POWER7 to 8, I've been told it's either 75% or double.

So every time IBM comes out with a newer chip, great improvements.

Really mostly IBM for the workload that we run. IBM and the System i is very well suited for it, for the core banking systems.

Recently there have been a lot of changes, and a lot of good things that we are planning to use. What we've been seeing is that within the Power system itself, there are more and more capabilities and features. You do not have to go outside and buy a third-party program product - like for replication, you don't have to go to a third-party. Years ago, you'd have to go for system monitoring.

IBM is building in all the tools you need to run the system: monitoring, replication, disaster recovery. I think if IBM continues to do the same thing - and every day they're bringing the price point down, with more CPW - they should just keep on doing what they're doing.

I don't have a problem with Power systems, especially running System i. For people running AIX, the interface is a bit more cryptic and they need a lot of commands. But once you implement System i on Power, it's a 10. It rocks. We're doing some work in Mexico right now where we're converting from OS/390 to Power systems.

The reliability is the main thing. Reliability and ease of use. The cost of ownership is down too.

It runs all our enterprise systems and because of the reliability, we don't have the same issue with downtime and unexpected downtime that other companies may have. I have been there for 10 years, running the Power, and we've had three unexpected experiences of downtime in 10 years.

We just want to see continued reliability and performance. And continued value for the price. The licensing could be simplified.

I have been using Power for 10 years. I have POWER7 and POWER8 and I use them for IBM i. We also have an 822L and Linux Red Hat. We started using Power on Linux a few months ago. We moved to it mainly because of the reliability.

It's got all the scalability I need. I can add on to to the box that I've got. Scale it out from where I'm at.

I have not had any problems with technical support. They have all done well every time I have needed them.

We were using Power5.

It was pretty straightforward. I have been doing this a long time, so it is pretty straightforward for me. There are more hardware things now that I've moved to external storage. It does become a little more complex there.

The licensing has improved over the years. I've been working with IBM for 30-plus years. The licenses have gotten better. We are experiencing some issues with Linux licensing between the different flavors, between Ubuntu and Red Hat, and which license you need for which machine, so that's getting to become a little complex.

No.

The OpenPOWER Foundation has brought many advantages. There are a lot more things available now, carried over from other industries.

I personally do consider IBM to be a market leader in servers. In order to maintain that position they just need to continue the performance and the reliability.

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.

Primarily the reliability. I can set up a system and it runs until we decide to get rid of it.

The reliability is one. We have a lot of extra redundancy built into Power and we run our critical applications on there so it protects our brand and our business.

Since POWER4.

We are very happy with the performance.

No, we have not.

It's very good. They are knowledgeable and there is always a point of contact.

POWER8 definitely handles the workload better than POWER7 did, as far as the threading between having a lot of partitions running in a system. There is less impact when the system doesn't bog down, when a lot of applications are running.

Licensing is not an issue but it is something that we are being asked for from our leadership. Because usage fluctuates all the time, they want to know that they are only paying for what they are using. And we're all competing against the cloud vendors now.

No. We have been running on Power ever since we went to SAP.

I am using POWER8 for AIX and Linux.

I wouldn't say that Power uniquely positions our company in the industry. We run all of our internal applications on it and we keep our business running with it.

As far as IBM being a market leader, I would think that they are certainly one of the players, I don't know if they are the leader or not. In order to be a market leader I think IBM would have to get into more shops and get the word out there. It's kind of like the Windows mentality, a lot people go with what they know or what they see advertised.

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.