My Experience with IBM POWER9 Servers
May 01, 2019
My Experience with IBM POWER9 Servers
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Power9 Servers
Overall Satisfaction with IBM POWER9 Servers
We are in the process of deploying our first POWER9 servers, for many different use cases. We are using some for IBM Spectrum Protect, some for a major project initiative, and one for general purpose and consolidation. This will let us reduce the number of physical servers we have on the floor, saving cost on hardware and software maintenance.
- Reliability: We typically purchase enterprise-class servers, and the POWER9's are fully redundant, which helps reduce any unplanned downtime.
- Performance: We targeted POWER9 servers for a major project, due to its performance and ability to utilize high-bandwidth adapters (100Gb Ethernet), in our case for networking.
- Virtualization and features: The ability to micro-partition and use features like LPM are crucial for us to maximize uptime for our applications.
- The ability to update firmware without rebooting the frame; some fixes are concurrent, but some deferred fixes require the frame to be rebooted.
- I can't think of any other cons!
- POWER9 servers are still relatively new in our environment, so we have not been able to realize any ROI just yet.
- Consolidation of older servers will definitely provide us ROI, but I'm not in a position that can quantify that.
We are an IBM shop, so we purchase servers only from them. I have used IBM servers starting back with POWER4, and have been greatly impressed with the advancement over the years in processing power and RAS capabilities.