Likelihood to Recommend If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.
Read full review 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 Pros When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match. When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in. Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience. When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world. Read full review 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 Cons Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in. The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded. As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning. Read full review 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 Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve.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 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 I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling .
Read full review 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 Azure Virtual Machines offer unparalleled flexibility in provisioning, managing and upgrading the VM instances, both manually and programmatically. AVM offer very granular billing options and enables high costs optimisations (while still being costly). The other competitors I mentioned are very good at offering dead-cheap VMs. But if you need anything beyond that, especially for big computing, you need Azure Virtual Machines.
Read full review 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 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 It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs Read full review 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 ScreenShots