Expensive hardware to start with but hopefully brings savings in the long term
August 02, 2021

Expensive hardware to start with but hopefully brings savings in the long term

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Power System S922

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Power

We use multiple IBM Power System S922 servers (as well as other IBM and Dell servers) as part of our infrastructure for hosting a particularly large and demanding Oracle database. This serves as part of the backend to various mission-critical services for our customers that are in constant high demand and require large amounts of bandwidth. The IBM Power Systems are able to provide the uptime, reliability, and throughout that our customers require.
  • Solid hardware. We have not experienced any failures as of yet.
  • POWER9 CPUs and high memory bandwidth provide excellent performance.
  • Decent I/O throughput.
  • Additional CPU sockets (currently limited to two) would allow for performance upgrades further down the line.
  • Resources for training are weak in comparison to other vendors. It took us longer than we had planned to get up to speed.
  • Some features such as data migration seem more complicate than is necessary.
  • Initial purchase was an expensive one, but we were able to replace a lot of existing hardware in doing so and we expect to save significant money in the long term.
  • Improved uptime and reliability keep our customers happy, and in turn, our other stakeholders too.
  • We now have a clearly defined upgrade path for future expansion and expect to make savings by committing to the Power System family of products.
As well as using IBM Power System S922 servers, we also have some S924 machines as well as various Dell PowerEdge servers for running our main database systems. All of them work well and have their pros and cons. The S922 excels when it comes to high bandwidth throughput for our Oracle database, and is the main reason it was selected for our workload. However, we do have some x86 only software services that for obvious reasons can not be run on the POWER9 systems. This is where the PowerEdge systems fill in the gap for us, so a complement of the two works well for us.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of IBM Power servers go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy IBM Power servers again?

Yes

IBM AIX, Debian OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
The IBM Power System S922 works exceedingly well for us with our mission-critical, high throughput database services. Any organization requiring very high bandwidth for these types of workloads should evaluate the Power System range.

However, if you require x86 support for your software stack, or if you're operating on a low budget, these POWER9 based servers are not for you and you should probably be looking at something in the Dell PowerEdge range or similar.