IBM Power9 systems offer the scalability and performance you need for massive database applications
December 08, 2020
IBM Power9 systems offer the scalability and performance you need for massive database applications
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Power Systems
We are a value-add reseller and service provider, and so we spend a lot of time investigating new and exciting technologies so that we can share them with our clients, and support their implementation there. We have run a lot of different workloads and benchmarks on the Power S914 with some fantastic results seen, especially in the field of large open-source databases.
- Robust, well thought out, modular hardware design is simple to install, maintain and upgrade.
- Massive CPU thread count lends itself well to modern hyperscale applications.
- Massive memory bandwidth likewise accelerates many workloads beyond the capabilities of traditional x86 hardware.
- Power9 systems, like their predecessors are rare, thus the skills to manage them at companies are rare. This in turn means a reluctance of companies to take the hardware on as it's unlike anything else in their estate.
- Some people find them pricey compared to just buying a pile of commodity x86 hardware.
Do you think IBM Power servers delivers good value for the price?
Yes
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?
No
Would you buy IBM Power servers again?
Yes
- Offers us something new and dramatically different in our portfolio to offer to clients.
- Offers people a real alternative to x86 for the first time in years - ARM is up and coming but not there yet in many cases.
- For us as a reseller, this is a positive as it allows us to differentiate our portfolio to clients, especially those processsing big-data/large databases.
When you choose the workload just right (e.g. a massive PostgreSQL database), there's simply no competition between any off the shelf Dell hardware and the Power S914 - we would choose the Power S914 any time we have a massive database or data storage and indexing solution to provide, as the core, thread counts and memory speeds are beyond anything else on the market today.