1. Home
  2. Rack Servers
  3. IBM Power servers Reviews
  4. User Review of IBM Power servers
IBM S914 is an entry level Power9 system - just be careful about wanting to highly leverage PowerVM with limited resources!
December 12, 2020

IBM S914 is an entry level Power9 system - just be careful about wanting to highly leverage PowerVM with limited resources!

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

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Power System S914

The S914 is used to run our ERP system (MAPICS) on IBMi. We run multiple logical partitions (LPARs), leveraging PowerVM Enterprise and Virtual I/O Server (VIOS). Running an IBMi-only ERP system severely limits our hardware options, but the Power9 platform is the best I've run it on yet.
  • Decreased power consumption vs. comparable Power8 systems.
  • PowerVM and VIOS have been more stable and reliable than our x86-based virtualization platform.
  • The fine-grained resource allocation in PowerVM allows us to make better use of the hardware available to us.
  • Overall, the low end Power9 systems (including the S914) are not great candidates for expansion. If you're going entry level, make sure to think about the future, at least as it relates to the expected life of the platform.
  • 220V Power is the only option.
  • Coupled with the V5000E flash array, we supported an increase in orders that would have brought our Power8 system to its knees.
  • When we were acquired, it was very easy to clone our production system for the purposes of closing. The old Power8 system would have been very, very hard to do this on.
  • As is usually the case with the Power platform, we were able to get more bang for the buck. Increase in CPU clock speed and application performance, plus a huge boost in storage performance for less than we paid monthly for the Power 8.
We selected the S914 because of the cost vs. projected requirements. In a closed ecosystem, you're just picking a T-Shirt size, not truly evaluating options. The bump up to S924 or S922 would have opened the door for expansion (Capacity of Demand), versus basically locking up all of our resources within the first month after deployment because of unforeseen circumstances.

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?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Power servers again?

No

Even in the closed IBM Power ecosystem, the use cases for the S914 are somewhat limited. The trade off in resource requirements to properly support PowerVM and VIOS makes it difficult to reach any sane level of virtualization density on the platform. Even without VIOS, we were venturing into expansion chassis territory to support two LPARs with external storage and tape backup on each. It became a question of how much we thought we'd expand the platform vs. how much we wanted to invest up front. If I had to do it over, I would have gone with the S924 or S922 in our setup.