The IBM Power product line is a family of servers.
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Lenovo ThinkSystem SR Series
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Lenovo offers the ThinkSystem SR series of rack servers, offering a wide range of options boasting price, power, or low foot print as desired. Presently Lenovo's ThinkSystem series of rack servers includes the SR250, SR530, SR550, SR570, SR590, SR630, SR650, and the SR670.
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.
I believe all businesses would benefit from Lenovo's series of products - as they can be custom-built to meet your needs. We have been utilizing Lenovo servers for the past seven or eight years now, and have had get success with their hardware builds. We had one issue with a bad SD card that was in a RAID0 - they replaced both SD cards free of charge, and I had them the next business day (this, obviously, is contingent on the level of warranty protection that you purchase with your hardware - but support was fantastic to work with!)
SATA/SSD/M2/SD support for front-end caching or for an entire storage solution
Allow x2 SD cards to be installed in a RAID0 setup, so that the host can run ESXi without any internal hard drives whatsoever. Also came with an internal battery for the RAID controller.
Lenovo Support is very quick to respond to issues - either by phone or by email.
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 Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve.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.
A video tutorial on upgrading built-in firmware on their systems would be fantastic. As it was a bit difficult to navigate to find the download, and also the install process the last time I did so.
The remote BIOS utility through the XClarity controller is difficult to reset a password on - if it's forgotten. I have yet to find a way to reset it on a host that has a password not working.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
The initial selection of Lenovo for servers was provided to us as a recommendation from a reseller. I was skeptical, initially, as I am not a fan of Lenovo's consumer-grade laptops. I was very intrigued by the price of these devices though, so we purchased two for a location to see how they worked. The recommendation panned-out, and all of our needs were met (and exceeded) by this new line of products brought to our attention. I'm sure there are countless other stories like mine with dozens of other manufacturers - but we are more than pleased with our fleet of Thinksystem servers at our district
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.
