IBM Power Systems Reviews

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.

Faster. We use JDE 9.1, and from the time that we started using the POWER8 hardware and processors, we could see a big difference in the processing for the JDE 9.1.

From an IT perspective, on my side of the systems, we don't have the JDE CNC team down on us all the time trying to blame everything on the system running too slow. Now they can't blame it on us because everything's so fast, they're just amazed by it.

We're in oil and gas and I think, right now, we're on the top of our competitors with the systems that we've had. From some of the other companies I've talked to, they're still using old IBM systems or they've gone to other platforms.

The CPU. It could always get faster. Pricing's always an issue - with every company; it could always be better.

A year and a half, roundabout.

On a scale of one to 10 - I've been doing this for 30 year's - I'd give it a ten, being the best. They're always there. They're always available. When the other platforms are going down, and they're working on them all the time, mine's always up. When the other platforms are having security issues, no one's getting into mine.

Very good. Sometimes.

I have one thing that I have a problem with, it's when they outsourced everything to India. I would rather have gum surgery than get on the phone and talk to somebody to try to put me with a technical consultant. Whenever I do get someone who picks up the phone here in the USA, I think, "This is going to go quick." It just never does when I get someone else, and my colleagues feel the same way.

We were using the POWER7 and moved up to the POWER8, because our contract was running out and we got a pretty good deal to move up to POWER8 hardware.

It was complex. We had IBM lab services come do it for us rather than our business partner, and it went well.

We see a return on investment from the move to POWER8.

Only IBM, for now.

We're using POWER8 with IBM i.

It let's me work more efficiently. Keeps me around a lot longer.

I consider IBM to be market leader in servers. To remain a market leader in the servers sector they need to keep doing what they're doing. I think they're going in the right direction.

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 am unsure of what the primary use case of this solution was, as my role was only related to deploying the solution.

I am unsure what features I found most valuable because I didn't use the power system deployment for the clients.

Unfortunately, I don't have any thoughts now on what could be improved.

We have used this solution for approximately six months. However, I am unsure if it is currently the latest version because we deployed the solution on-premises as vendors.

The solution is scalable.

We have had a good experience with the technical support team at IBM.

I would classify the initial setup as medium. It took approximately one day to deploy IBM power systems. Everyone on the team had their role, so I can't speak about what each person did.

I am unsure if the clients have seen a return on investment.

I am unfamiliar with the licensing costs.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. However, there are improvements that can be made on the technical side.

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.

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

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

The product is stable. 

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

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

The solution does not require any maintenance. 

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