How Power 9 consolidated and condensed our NIX workloads
April 30, 2019
How Power 9 consolidated and condensed our NIX workloads
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Power9 Servers
Overall Satisfaction with IBM POWER9 Servers
Power 9 is being used as the standard platform for AIX and IBM across multiple BUs to run our core business products that we provide to our customers. We are now exploring new opportunities with Linux on Power and ICP on Power in order to provide the business units a choice of platform to run their workloads on.
- Our Power 9 servers provide a rock-solid platform to run our services on that we can maintain without application downtime or incidents.
- Power 9 scaled up nicely from our Power 7 and Power 8 servers to provide better performance per core and more memory capacity for the cost.
- We are able to condense our servers when migrating from Power 7 to Power 9 from a 4 CEC 770 to a single E950 to improve floor space and power consumption within the data center.
- The E950 platform could support IBM so that we could consolidate our workloads to a single standard system.
- Enable redundant IO paths through the SDI solution for Power9 like we have in the traditional VIO server solution to be able to perform online maintenance and additional resiliency to the SDI solution.
- Power 9 does not allow for abstraction of the LPAR ID and Serial number from the VM in order to allow easier LPM of licensed applications.
- Power 9 has reduced our data center footprint for our Unix workloads by a factor of 4.
- Power 9 allows us to consolidate our IBM and AIX workloads to reduce overall investment in hardware and data center resources.
- Combined with PowerVC, our Power 9 servers have accelerated our VM deployments from weeks to minutes to be able to stand up a new VM in an environment.
Power 9 is the only platform for our AIX and IBM workloads, but for Linux, we are using Power 9 to drive our highly threaded and memory intensive workloads as Power 9 provides better performance characteristics than the comparable x86 platform. With Power 9 we also have a much more resilient platform on a per server basis than the x86 platform.