Item: IBM Power servers
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Power servers

Pros and Cons

Pros

Host up to 32TB Virtual Machine
Redundancy out of the box
Works seamless with existing datacenter network and storage

Cons

Lower the costs
Lack of Support for all Linux and older versions too

Return on Investment

Met target delivery architecture
Binds easily with other equipment in the data center already, no need for new network and storage infra
Unable to run for long due to costs, ROI is slow

IBM Power allows us to host and scale up to 32TB of Virtual Machine (VM). We were earlier limited to 12TB per single VM, and could only scale-out (or horizontally). Since some of our solutions are extensively memory intensive, we wanted to host larger VM.We are SAP only shop, given some SAP solutions are memory intensive and some industries need to exploit 'memory intensive' IBM Power was the only choice to scale architecture beyond 12TB memory with support for High Availability design as well! This has drastically improved the time we had to spend on optimizing the applications, solution and database.

Alternatives Considered

We did not try any other similar offering.

Key Insights

Do you think IBM Power servers delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with IBM Power servers's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Power servers live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Power servers go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Power servers again?

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.

Large Memory Virtual Machines
High Availability
Ease of Integration with existing DC Infra

Likelihood to Renew

Evaluating IBM Power servers and Competitors

Products Replaced

Not Sure

Key Differentiators

Other
Integration with Other Systems
Ease of Use

"Scalability" was the single most important factor to us. We wanted to scale up the virtual machines to large/er/est memory possible and IBM Power servers made this possible.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

We wouldn't change the evaluation process if we were to do it again.

IBM Power servers Implementation

Implementation Rating

Integration with Datacenter was somewhat easy, Integration with tools/platforms was difficult.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Yes - Trial Phase
DC Infra Integration
Tool Integration
Operations
Scale Geographically

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled

IBM Power servers Support

Support Rating

Our Datacenter management teams take care of managing hardware support, issues and tracking.

IBM Power servers Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Quick Initial Response	Need to explain problems multiple times