Item: IBM Power Virtual Server
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently all of our SAP systems are running on Virtual Server hosted at IBM. We have many Linux servers and few HANA servers that are currently used every day by end users. Our production needs those servers running to be operational and make sure everything is running great. Those servers need to be up and running 24/7, every day of the year including holidays.

Pros and Cons

Good reliability.
Great Support to resolve issue.
High flexibility for maintenance.

It takes some time, more time than expected to resolve issues when we already know the solution.
Some issues could be harder to resolve when we need help of more specialised people.
We get issues with the billing for the few last months and we need to pay lot of attention on this to have the right pricing.

Key Insights

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

Not sure

Are you happy with IBM Power Virtual Server's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Power Virtual Server live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of IBM Power Virtual Server go as expected?

Would you buy IBM Power Virtual Server again?

Yes

Return on Investment

We did not need to upgrade all our hardware in our on-premise datacenter.
When we have a production down that requires some OS-level intervention that is requiring more time to resolve then when we were on premise.

Alternatives Considered

Before to migrated to IBM we were hosted at SAP HEC and after a few years we saw our server was in fact hosted in IBM datacenter. Then we decide to transfer to IBM to reduce cost of a third party that is only doing the intermediary and could slow down the resolution of high priority.

Security

In the last year I think the only unplanned down time was due to the Akamai outrage on the 2021-07-22. Besides this we get some issues with communication between our servers due to firewall issues but this problem is now resolved and the server seems to work fine now.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Power System Virtual Server is really great if you do not want to take care of all the hardware parts of the system. The problem is sometimes you need to access at the OS level to transfer a file to the system that your application requires to update or continue to work correctly. This could slow down the process because that requires many people to make things work and do this correctly.

IBM review

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Power System Virtual Server