IBM Power Systems Reviews

We use the solution as a database server. The core banking database runs on IBM Power LAPR with terabytes of memory (20 TB of database size). Performance and availability is top-notch. With database clustering, we ensure the high availability of our database. Runtime resource allocation made life easy when required.

It can be used as an application server as well. With the application server's HA (IBM Power HA) clustering, we ensure the high availability of our application.

We also used IBM power for CBS application for banks and for IBM MQ for Messaging.

IBM Power system is the most reliable server in terms of RAS (Reliability, Availability, Sustainability). These features give us a boost of performance in our application which in terms runs our business. 

Performance, uptime, manageability, runtime resources allocation (Using Power VM), and longevity are other key features that ensure our business application runs smoothly.  

Also, Power VM gives us the flexibility to increase or decrease machine resources when required. this gives us the benefit of growing or shrinking in terms of scalability over time, ensuring ROI.

The most valuable features include:

• RAS (Reliability, Availability, Sustainability)
• Reliability (Reliable on performance, uptime, and  longevity)
• Availability (Available for applications running on it)
• Sustainability (Sustainable for backward compatibility of application growth and parts availability)
• Accessibility (The server gives performance even if the CPU is 100%. No new user can connect, however, the existing user will not understand that the server CPU is 100% full)
• Machine Performance, Uptime, manageability, and runtime resource allocation (Using Power VM) are highly beneficial.

Feature-wise, the power system is great, however, IBM should work on pricing. No available price list is on the web. Due to this, the customer cannot compare pricing and have a perception that IBM Power server price is high. Also customer wants to have a comparison with RICS server with INTEL server which never should be done we can not compare Mango with Apple. So in my opinion price transparency should be there, so people can understand. No new feature is not in my mind which may be add in IBM Power.

I've used the solution for 13 years. I've used it from IBM Power 5 to IBM Power 10.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great.

We did not use a different solution. 

The initial setup is complex for the machine setup potion. 

We implemented the solution with the vendor. They were good.

We have witnessed an ROI of 130%.

The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are high. That said, you will get your ROI if you are in a CAPEX model operation. If your operation runs on an OPEX model, this is not an ideal option.

We did not evaluate other options. 

We use the solution for Oracle databases mostly. We are trying to bring in some new workloads, like Open Shift and Linux. 

It's been very reliable for Oracle databases. The performance has been very good. 

The reliability and availability are both excellent.

It offers very good security.

The performance and stability are great.

Technical support is helpful.

The solution can scale well. 

They simply need to promote or provide more support to open applications like .NET.

We'd like to see the solution support skill servers. 

The pricing is high.

I've used the solution since 1990.

I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is very reliable and offers very good performance.

I'd rate the scalability ten out of ten. 

We do have plans to increase usage in the future. 

Technical support has been excellent so far.

Positive

The initial setup was very easy to set up. It's not a complex process. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing is a little high. Some models have a good price. However, many are expensive. We do have a lot of taxes in our company, and that adds to the cost.

I would rate the solution ten out of ten. 

I'm using a variety of versions of the solution. I use Power nine, six, five, ten, et cetera.

I'd recommend the solution to others. The performance is great, and it offers excellent reliability. It is a very good platform. However, it is expensive. 

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.

I like the processor speed. I don't think that there's a match for it out there. I like the use of the Hypervisor and the VIO functions that you can utilize. I just don't think that there's anything out that matches it, and it's easy to implement.

The flexibility of it, being able to run multiple OS's on it. I can run Linux on it, I can run i on it, I can run AIX on it, and it's all on the same physical hardware. Being able to do that, it just gives us a lot of flexibility in that area.

I know that they are doing a lot with Linux, so maybe a more direct way of converting to Linux on some applications; some way to actually sell it a little bit better. Because you still get into the expense of going to the Power hardware, but if you're already on the Power hardware, I don't see the issue. A lot of people just don't seem to want to progress onto Linux, but they want to keep Linux on the Wintel or Intel devices. And to me, you just don't get the chips and the ability of the chips that you get on AIX, and on the Power hardware.

We've been using Power since I've been with the company. I've been there 16 years. 

AIX is very stable. Our whole Power system has been very stable. We very rarely have outages. Most of the outages have not been attributed to the hardware, it's more attributed to network or SAN. 

Now we have had some hardware outages, but those are based on doing maintenance such as firmware upgrades, and the like. Those have caused issues, but you know when those are happening because you've already had them scheduled. So you know to be prepared for it, what work will be done.

We have not had any issues with our scalability.

Technical support is good. When you find the right people, they are very knowledgeable. But you have to know to get the right one, you have to explain your issue properly, that way you can get to the right person.

I feel upgrades are straightforward, especially the AIX upgrades. Because, unlike with Windows, you have all the small fix packs, most of the time you're either doing a major TL or a service pack. I feel that that is much easier than having to go through doing all of the small pieces.

In terms of the upgrades of AIX and the Power from the 7 to the 8, I did see a return of the investment because we have a small Oracle data base running on some of our apps. To be able to take it from the POWER7 where you're using .1 CPU - this is just in development - that you could take it down to .05 CPU and double the number of LPARs that you have, that is a very good feature.

We do have a lot of Wintel as well, so it's more of a mix and match. Yes, other things have been considered. We went with IBM because we have been with IBM hosting, and one of our main apps is running on AIX. We would have to do a lot to convert it. So it seems to be running fine where it is.

We're running on POWER7s and POWER8. We started with POWER4, and moved up. In fact, we started with 7028s and 7013s at one time. We've been in the business a good while. We're using it for AIX and now we're using it for i as well.

I think the Power system uniquely positions our company with the speed it has, and the processing power. I think it keeps our app running at a maximum output, and that keeps the company running better.

I do consider IBM to be a market leader. I would say for them to maintain it, to me, I don't like the thing of following the trend of everybody, everybody's trying to go in this direction, that direction. I feel like sometimes you can just improve on your product, and that will increase your market share, versus following the trend of everyone else.

I am a system administrator, and I work with AS/400. I take care of the upgrades. I am also making the CL programs (CLP) and working on RPG skills for myself. 

We have multiple environments. We have Power9, Power8, and Power7. V7R4 is the latest one out there, but V7R3 is the latest one that we have. Companies don't deploy the latest version unless they are sure, and they have got feedback from others about the version. We also have disaster recovery and backup machines.

The flashcopy feature is helping us so much. It reduces time . For example, if we want to have a backup on a machine, we can flashcopy it to another environment, and this first machine is free to use.

Power System is like a dream solution for every IT person because it has redundancy, and it doesn't stop. It doesn't get affected easily.

I don't see any weaknesses in this solution. At the moment, we have Power8. It is stable and runs smoothly. We have a big load, and it is working very well.

The redundancy in Power machines is very important and it gives stability and feasability on all levels. Power systems can integrade different types of storage, which gives the advantage to combine all your storage capacity especially if you go for virrualization.

In Power6, latency was an issue, but nowadays, we are on Power8, which doesn't have any such problems.

Sometimes, we can have issues when we are moving or migrating to a newer version, which is the case with almost every company. Some new issues or problems show up suddenly, and you do not have the time to research and find the solution. That's when we contact IBM technical support. 

It is incredibly stable.

We use IBM technical support not so much per year because everything is clear and has procedure, and most of the time all migrations or upgrades will be prepared and tested before moving to production environment. Sometimes, we face complications while moving to a newer version, where we share such cases with IBMi team. It is very seldom when we do not have the time to research and find the solution. That's when we contact IBM technical support.

We are also in contact with the application supplier, who can provide any request from our side with the fix needed. The deployment will be at our level, first on the testing environment and after the result will meet our team expectations, we deploy it on the production environment.

I didn't use any solution previously.

We are a team of three people. We are responsible for the deployment of the database as well as switching from one machine to another.

We are responsible for OS upgrade. When we are moving from one version to another, sometimes I make plans for that. I also take charge of some other parts because we share everything in the team.

I would say if you are not using the IBMi solution, you are missing something. You should at least know about this solution. I was an IT support previously, and When I started to use IBM Power Systems, I fell in love with this machine due the professionalism, solidity and high scalability . 

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is how not to have a single instance of failure. These machines don't die and don't have any problems. For me, it was astonishing to be able to switch disks or the power supply without turning off the machine. It is a reliable and great solution.

I would rate IBM Power Systems a nine out of ten.

The banking sector primarily uses Power Systems. It is run on their core banking environments due to its stability, reliability, and availability. When it comes to the telecom sector, telecom sectors have been utilizing Power Systems for middleware applications and CR. 

There are many benefits. One Power Systems in a single rack is able to accommodate much more workloads by using physically less space and less power as compared to other platforms, like Intel. That is one benefit. 

Another benefit is that you can perform maintenance and activities. You can conduct a lot of maintenance activities without any outages in your business. 

When you're running Power Systems, it is owned and supported by IBM and AIX operating system is not an open-source operating system. It's an IBM proprietary system. It is built for IBM Power Systems specifically. It works exceptionally well because the hardware, and all the components, and the software, they're all built to work on IBM Power Systems.

Micro-Partitioning is where you can slice your physical code. If you have one code in a system, you can further slice it up to 20%. You can assign one virtual machine, which is called LPAR, 0.05 of a code. It allows you to more effectively use your available system resources. That includes your physical processes, your code, your memories, and allows you to dynamically increase them and decrease them whenever you need without any outage.

There are other features like Live Partition Mobility that allows you to move your workload from one physical Power Systems to another Power Systems, without an outage to the business. 

Active Memory Sharing dynamically adjusted your memory based on the requirements of the logical partition. 

Active Memory Expansion allows you to compress your memory on the run time to allow you to have less physical memory available, but provision more memory to your partitions, as everything will be compressed on the fly.

Reliability, availability, and serviceability of the IBM Policy Systems are unmatched. 99% of the maintenance activities can be performed online without having any outage for customers.

It does not offer the ability to run any X86 or X64 Intel architecture-based application on Power Systems. There are a lot of applications, lots of business use cases that do not support this architecture as of now. If somehow application tasks can be ported on to IBM Power Systems, that would be a big improvement.

Power Systems has dominance in terms of features, and the capability is much more powerful than the other competitors right now. Intel is the other primary platform. If you look at Intel x86 and compare it with Power Systems, all of the features are much more reliable, available and serviceable as compared to the Intel platform. The one thing that we lack is that a lot more applications are supported on the internet compared to Power Systems. That's one thing that we primarily lack.

I've been working with Power Systems since 2010. I just left IBM a few months ago. I delivered solutions that contained IBM Power Systems and deployed them in customers' infrastructure at an enterprise level.

I've primarily worked with AIX 6.1, 7.1 and the last one that I deployed was AIX 7.2.

The stability of IBM Power Systems along with the AIX operating system is unmatched. Once you are up and running, you will rarely face any outage. You cannot compare it to any other platform.

Once you are up and running and do not make any changes to your configuration, you will not face many issues. Errors and VFDs outages have been rare as well. If you do not make changes and keep your environment stable, you will not have any outages.

The processes are scalable. You can increase memory on the fly without any outages. With capacity on-demand you can purchase a Power Systems with selected physical cores, and memory activated. When you feel the need for that memory and you feel that you need excess capacity, then you can purchase the license for those, or you can get an hourly license and activate them as per your need and provide your business the extra power that it needs at that time.

For the maintenance, there are two types of components. One is the customer replaceable unit CRU and the FIU that IBM replaced. We have a call home feature that you can enable whenever there's a hardware failure or that sort of problem we'll call the particularly log with IBM, and then IBM supplies the part to the customer. If it is a customer replaceable unit, a single person will go to the data center and replace it.

The difficulty of the initial setup depends. If you talk to someone coming from VMware or Hyper-V, they will find it a bit complex, but if you talk to someone from Linux, they will find it a bit different initially, but with time it becomes very simple and easy to understand. 

IBM Power Systems has some tools, like power VC that is a private cloud on-prem. That allows you to do the whole deployment automatically via a very easy web-based user interface. 

The time it takes to deploy depends on how many virtual machines you need to run, the overall complexity of the solution, and if migrations are involved. The initial deployment can take around five days which includes the initial physical installation in the data center. Then the physical integration with the network, the transfer switches, and the storage is the customer infrastructure. After that, we configure the virtualization. If we configure a single little part, it would usually take you around five days.

As far as the infrastructure is concerned, a single person can deploy it. If the person deploying only has experience with Power Systems and does not have storage skills, you will need someone from the storage team as well to do the deployment. 

There are a lot of day-to-day administrative tasks. Problems that you face in a typical environment, you will not face on Power Systems. If you secure your environment, you can better focus on other productive tasks for your organization, other than spending time logging into your VMs and making changes after every little while and things like that. Your technical teams can offload a lot of the daily routine tasks.

You can compare Power Systems to Oracle Exadata. Oracle Exadata collects only for databases, but IBM Power Systems has a shared processor pool that we can allocate and using this shared processor, we can reduce the licensing cost for Oracle databases and achieve better performance when you combine it with IBM Flash System storage.

Solaris is unique. There are not any other platforms that I would compare to right now.

It's nothing to be scared of it. It might be completely different than what you have been using, but IBM Power Systems is very stable and supports the systems that we have already been using. The Private Cloud IAS offering is included free for all enterprise customers.

It is easy to administrate and manage IBM Power Systems to make the process of moving from VMware or other environments easy.

When you get Power Systems, you get points and after the initial deployment that is performed by IBM, using those points, you can get five days or 10 days of service from IBM. Those services include Power Systems training. If you have enough points, you can get IBM to deliver training. 

I would rate Power Systems an eight out of ten based on the new features that were launched recently. They made it available on the cloud. A customer getting a Power Systems in their environment on plan is very expensive. You can create a VM on the IBM or Google cloud, running on IBM Power Systems. Or you can get the PEP2 client code. There is a little hardware cost.

Using IBM Power Systems, one of our latest resolutions was with POWER9. In our organization, we use IBM Power Systems S922 and S924. S924 is a basic database server with 5200 storage. So, that's the server acting as a database server. S922 is for IBM Spectrum Protect and backup. In the solution, an identical product means hardware production, and DR. HA is then implemented.

IBM's pricing and distribution policies differ from those of Dell, making it challenging for partners to adjust. IBM's approach to managing its partners and securing deals is looser than Dell's. As a result, IBM's partners find it challenging to navigate their policies. Although our company also has a partnership with Dell, there is a significant difference in how the two companies manage their respective partners. Nowadays, we are convinced that when we work on a particular opportunity or a deal, IBM pushes it away from us and presents it to a different partner.

The number of times IBM refreshes its operating system appears to be very slow. This case is true when compared to other tools like VMware, Red Hat, or any other Linux products. In general, the updates or the latest versions of other products are much faster than IBM Power Systems, creating an impression in the market that AIX will perish. Even though IBM might be spending time and money on the products, when it comes to the implementation part involving products from IBM or Oracle, they usually don't have a compatible version that works well with Power Linux. Also, compatible versions are mostly available in AIX. From 2017 to 2023, there has been no significant increase in the number of updates or versions from IBM.

I have experience with IBM Power Systems for eleven to twelve years. My company has a partnership with IBM.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It was not me but one of my customers who used a different solution before choosing IBM Power Systems.

Price-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten. It's a costly solution that needs a lot of effort to convince the customer to choose it.

Our company did compare Intel with IBM during our internal evaluation process.

Speaking about the stability of the solution's system once we configure it, if the system goes down, then it takes time for us to bring it back to normalcy is minimal compared to any other enterprise product we've seen in the market. Also, the features in the solution work well. The number of crashes we experience with IBM is minimal. We anticipate that the rest of the features in the solution will work in the background.

Owing to IBM's pricing and lack of support for their partners, particularly their weak partner support policies, we often encounter difficulties, especially when dealing with larger customers. When navigating through their policies, it can feel like we hit a brick wall. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.