Lenovo ThinkSystem SR Series vs. Oracle SPARC Servers

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!)

Incentivized

Excellent to consolidate workload using the LDom Virtualization (which is included free of charge). Good integration into Oracle Support with Automated Service Requests (ASR). Easy to migrate workloads from older servers to newer generations, such as SPARC S7 or T8. After migrating workloads from older SPARC T4 to S7, applications are approximately 2x faster.

• Affordability
• Flexibility with custom builds
• 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.

Incentivized

• encryption
• masking
• redaction
• subsetting

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We didn't have any problems whatsoever with integration

Incentivized

Extreme long lifetime (10+ years). High performance. SPARC S7 CPU has 4.2GhZ and SPARC T8 has 5GhZ. Virtualization is included for free. Very easy to use because it runs Oracle Solaris. The SPARC Servers scale very well. Oracle SPARC Servers have positively impacted our organization by improving our budget, as we can use the system for many years without having to purchase new systems.

No unplanned downtime over many years.

Very high CPU speed with 4-5 GhZ

Support requests are opened automatically.

Component replacements are very fast.

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

Incentivized

In terms of the Power ecosystem, the use cases of IBM Power System S914 is very limited. Resources required for properly working PowerVM and VIOS are very difficult. In Oracle SPARC Servers setup, it is pretty easy with very limited steps to be performed. This helped our Return of Investment become positive very quickly.

Incentivized

The servers scale very well with lots of CPU cores.

• Our uptime has increased from our old HP ProLiant servers from 8+ years ago.
• These servers are also cheaper than previous models we have deployed in the past
• XClarity controller allows for remote BIOS functionality - which we hadn't been able to utilize, previously.

Incentivized

• Does Not Support Domain Migration
• Migration Fails When the Target Machine Has Insufficient Free LDCs
• Limit the Maximum Number of Virtual Functions That Can Be Assigned to a Domain

Incentivized