Likelihood to Recommend I'd strongly recommend IBM Power servers to anyone who has the budget for it. A Power Virtual Machine, what is generally called FlexTB VM, can support as many small VM of 256GB, and scale up to 32TB on the fly. If IBM recommended architecture is combined with your organizational reference architecture, then forget about running into unplanned downtimes.
Read full review Vsphere Operation Management is suitable for automating the process of bringing up an alternate data center in case of a disaster. It also is a great way for testing your readiness of disaster. You have the ability to bring up a server in a "bubble" for testing. This way you can show your admins how the failover process will work.
Read full review Pros I love how it supports a mix of operating systems protection of our sensitive energy data and ensuring compliance with industry regulations. It provides a flexibility that ensures that we can accommodate increased workloads without a complete overhaul of our infrastructure. Read full review The best thing about VSOM is that it's built into VCenter so you only have one point of administration VSOM does a great job of making applications intuitive Re-IPing virtual machines are a must and VSOM does a great job of making this a simple process Read full review Cons A solid IDE for editing programs. SEU was simple and solid. Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve. That's fine. But RDi is expensive and shaky at best, and VS Code, while free, is severely lacking even the modicum of features RDi has. Read full review The installation of VSOM is very tedious It uses an MS SQL database It should be able to adjust for hardware modifications in VCenter Read full review Likelihood to Renew This is one of the best systems on the market. You can have Flash/Copy which created another LPAR to look like the system you are copying. This takes seconds and not minutes. Then you can use BRNS to do full system backups nightly with no downtime. I am ready for us to upgrade to a Power 10.
Read full review Usability They are very easy to set up and use once you re knowledgeable enough to deal with it. They are continuously enhance the user experience on the HMC and operations on the systems. Once setup it's like a beast, going on and on. I have experience with servers that are not being rebooted for more than 1000 days
Read full review Reliability and Availability In all of the years I have used various Power System, I have never had any problems at all. Even when hackers were attacking our email servers and many users PCs, the IBM Power System came out completely unscathed. I haven't even had any application errors that were able to take the system down. Nor have I ever experienced an unplanned outage
Read full review Performance The IBM Power System is built for integration. It supports multiple operating systems and you can run multiple OS's on the same box with no problems at all. It also supports a number of open source languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Perl which helps you continue to grow and integrate with lots of other systems.
Read full review Support Rating On large-scale systems, the rating would have been 10. However, I have seen some cases in more rural areas where the IBM onsite support is not as available or of the highest quality as in the past. For software support, there are sometimes instances of language barriers.
Read full review Implementation Rating Systems are robust and you need to know exactly what your are going to do with them. There are multiple configurations possible and you need to gather your requirements first, before going on with the implementation. Tuning is a must before migrating production systems
Read full review Alternatives Considered Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others... Power server do not need to have release often power server are much more strong then other manufacturer Power server do not need to restart offen
Read full review vSphere with Operations Management has a much better way of automating the re-IPing of servers so you can stand them up in a different environment or location. You do, however, need another way of replicating your servers to your DR site, VSOM will not do that. We used EMC Recover Point for replication.
Read full review Scalability This system can work in a small factory with a few users and easily scale out to thousands of users. It is truly amazing on how much you can throw at this box and it will just keep humming. It is great for use across multiple departments and even across multiple corporations. I worked at one company where we were hosting multiple corporations on just one large Power System and had ZERO problems.
Read full review Return on Investment In the event of a crash, IBM Power servers offer a variety of simple options to recover the operating system. With the flexibility offered by IBM Power servers, the production business can be improved by making the most of its physical servers. Read full review In the case of a disaster, the ROI would be substantial. The license for VSOM is pretty expensive initially. Support for VSOM is terrific. Read full review ScreenShots