In general, we provide services to customers more quickly, with faster application performance and no downtime. Our boxes are highly resilient and redundant, thanks to their work components and servers, which ensure high availability.

The banking environment was running the physical servers of like five to six stacks. The utilization of the physical space they were renting out reduced. It enables them to save space. Because when you're leasing, space counts. They were saving quite a healthy amount of money.

The maintenance of the physical hardware is more complex because there were different systems running and you need to go directly into the data center to use it. Now, when it comes to Power Systems, they were using the virtual system and were sitting on centers to verify if there was a hardware failure.

It also saves the cost of having one person at the data center solely looking at data systems. This also saves costs.

When you're using five stack or six stacks, the power utilization of those servers will be high as compared to the two stacks. If you need to add more CPU resources, compute resources to the server, adding those to a physical server is sometimes impossible because there is limited capacity. But when it comes to IBM Power, they have high compute resources. You can add it and you can utilize it. It comes with five or six years of planning. If you have planning and a good planner, then you can use the system for the next four, five years, and that can easily fulfill your requirements. 

It's been very reliable for Oracle databases. The performance has been very good. 

IBM Power system is the most reliable server in terms of RAS (Reliability, Availability, Sustainability). These features give us a boost of performance in our application which in terms runs our business. 

Performance, uptime, manageability, runtime resources allocation (Using Power VM), and longevity are other key features that ensure our business application runs smoothly.  

Also, Power VM gives us the flexibility to increase or decrease machine resources when required. this gives us the benefit of growing or shrinking in terms of scalability over time, ensuring ROI.

The flashcopy feature is helping us so much. It reduces time . For example, if we want to have a backup on a machine, we can flashcopy it to another environment, and this first machine is free to use.

From a reliability standpoint it has provided us with excellent performance. 

We are in retail and we can't send technical people out to retail locations. We have to have a system that is very reliable, that will basically run 24/7, 365. In some cases, we have had the same chassis in a location for 10 years. For the most part, it takes its normal fans and power drives and power supplies, but it's the same chassis that has been sitting there running. That's why we continue to purchase IBM and Power equipment.

The Power Systems can oftentimes be a tough sell because it is much more expensive than Commodity X86 hardware. But it's not a dollars and cents kind of thing. It's the fact that we don't spend dollars and cents. It's the reliability. The fact that we've been able to use the same procedures and processes in our stores for so long is a huge benefit.

The older version of the servers that we had was the Dell Edge. The Dell Edge was a very old model and it had limited hardware capability and storage capacity. We had unfortunately faced some problems with providing for the new services due to these limitations. I'm talking about financially providing for the new service. 

The improvement was quite noticeable when we did the upgrade. We had faster service, better internet connection, and a more stable internet connection. We had a very stable active directory. I would say that whenever the users wanted to log in, we had no delays in creating the user profile and having the user access the server services such as Outlook or the internet. A firewall was installed also. The improvements were on a network scale, as well as the scale of the service. 

It allows us to share the resources with multiple lines of businesses. That's one issue we had with one line of business, purchasing a physical server then it would be dedicated to that line of business. There would be one OS on it so a lot of the resources were not utilized. Now with PowerVM, we're actually able to sell them the LPAR itself and the corporate entity can purchase the physical asset. This allows us to push the utilization up to 70 to 80%.

I think the biggest driving factor for the bank is the cost, the cost-performance profile, it's better than anything else.

If you virtualize, Power hardware allows you to oversubscribe CPUs, and we take a big advantage of that for the bank. We save the bank millions of dollars by oversubscribing, because we have probably 700 DevOp servers, where they develop software. The developer might have 40 or 50 servers. They don't run them all at the same time, maybe three or four of them do. So we give those 40 or 50 servers just a couple of CPUs. We way oversubscribe. In fact, IBM-ers raise their eyebrows when we tell them our oversubscription rate.

Security is one. But it's a total, comprehensive solution.

It's really good for banking. As a matter of fact, I know many banks that are using AS400s as their back end on Power. It scales a lot, you can just keep on adding frames, you can add on CPUs, you get capacity on demand, you can tune the machine very easily to handle different workloads. It's very efficient, it's secure, it's robust and resilient, you can add on disaster recovery and it's cool.

Right now we use Power for high-end AIX systems. We're always looking to leverage what we're using. We have some high-end customers on our P8s. The one thing that makes life easier is it's very dependable.

We are a partner to IBM, we do product development for IBM. We're not a customer of Power Systems. We are developing only on AIX and for all versions of Power, 6, 7, 8.

It helps in delivering mission critical applications, very high reliability. It doesn't fail, it's a very stable platform, very reliable, and the user interface is good. The administrative cost and expenses are also low. It's good.

To not have to manage the chipset or have the software or hardware really be a concern for us. It just runs itself.

It would be the efficiency of the chip, the ability to handle a phenomenal amount of load for not a lot of money. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to.

One of the big things I've seen is that you can dynamically move devices or processor memory, capacity on demand, things like that. We actually just used the CUoD feature this past year. We enabled four more cores on our server. It kinda got us out of a gray spot.

For me, as an AS/400 I series guy, I think there's a lot of benefits to that OS. I think a lot of users really like it, despite the green screens. But after you get working with it, you're very familiar with it. So, to me, the hardware's there and I think the AS/400 or iSeries OS is very good as well.

It runs all our enterprise systems and because of the reliability, we don't have the same issue with downtime and unexpected downtime that other companies may have. I have been there for 10 years, running the Power, and we've had three unexpected experiences of downtime in 10 years.

Performance. We run our financial environment on it and there are key dates you always have to hit. Performance is key there, when we close the quarters and the like. You can't risk missing dates for getting your numbers to the street.

The flexibility of it, being able to run multiple OS's on it. I can run Linux on it, I can run i on it, I can run AIX on it, and it's all on the same physical hardware. Being able to do that, it just gives us a lot of flexibility in that area.

It has improved the stability of the Oracle database. We have a big database running in a Power environment and it is more stable than compared to what we are adding.

The reliability is one. We have a lot of extra redundancy built into Power and we run our critical applications on there so it protects our brand and our business.

There are many benefits. One Power Systems in a single rack is able to accommodate much more workloads by using physically less space and less power as compared to other platforms, like Intel. That is one benefit. 

Another benefit is that you can perform maintenance and activities. You can conduct a lot of maintenance activities without any outages in your business. 

When you're running Power Systems, it is owned and supported by IBM and AIX operating system is not an open-source operating system. It's an IBM proprietary system. It is built for IBM Power Systems specifically. It works exceptionally well because the hardware, and all the components, and the software, they're all built to work on IBM Power Systems.

We get better performance out of our applications, out of our databases running on Power, than we would on anything else that we have looked at.

I have been using POWER5, POWER6, POWER7, and then we transferred onto POWER8. We really have reduced our billing cycles from days to hours. 

Secondly, it is really good for billing jobs. It is reducing our time. We used to do billing in multiple days, now have reduced it to hours. That's great.

It helps our run times and our batches run faster. It allows people to get their job done faster. It allows us to deliver better SLA's. I'm not sure that it uniquely positions our company in our industry.

From an IT perspective, on my side of the systems, we don't have the JDE CNC team down on us all the time trying to blame everything on the system running too slow. Now they can't blame it on us because everything's so fast, they're just amazed by it.

We're in oil and gas and I think, right now, we're on the top of our competitors with the systems that we've had. From some of the other companies I've talked to, they're still using old IBM systems or they've gone to other platforms.

For me, personally, I've been around Power, IBM i, since it was System/38. It's been a long time. Personal knowledge of it is my strength. I can relay that into solutions for our customers.

In our case we are a business partner, we sell solutions. But I think what our customers appreciate most is that they can save space, since Power is high performance. You can have fewer machines, fewer servers and good performance in your environment.

It has helped them improve in a lot of ways. It has improved their efficiency as well as their scalability, from a growth perspective. They want to add more servers, more processing power, things like that. They can be much more easily done now.

POWER8 was a huge upgrade. I think we had POWER6s before, and just the I/O and getting the information we need faster to the customers. We had a little saying of "one click, two seconds," get them what they needed, and POWER8 helped us get there to provide that for them.

We're in the insurance industry and we actually moved up in our market share because of it. We started being able to make remote apps that our customers could get to. Then call on that backbone, of that system, and enter information, upload it to us, those types of things, all tied in, that we probably couldn't have done with the POWER6

When using it with the virtualization, we've finally gotten to the point of being able to do what VMware VirtualCenter does, but we do it more robustly, a lot faster and probably easier.

Honestly, the customer is always happy if he gets good performance.

I think we are able to run our entire organization on a smaller machine than if we had multiple Intel servers. The software that's available for the Power Systems also gives us our industry edge. 

It brings reliability. Rarely do we have failures.

TCOs is highly competitive, if not always the best, especially if you're running a per-core priced database.

I think the main thing that POWER8 is doing for the industry in general is it's leap frogging all the other technologies that exist out in the market from a performance capacity and total cost of ownership point of view. You can scale these servers up or scale out and replace a lot of footprint for other organizations. 

An IBM i customer is more of a traditional business, they've been around for a while, they've been running on IBM i for, maybe, a couple decades and for them it's all about being able to continue to move forward, maybe even scale down the size of the server, the footprint of the server, the energy consumption and all those things that come along with it.

Reliability and the performance. 

For management, they feel more secure. They feel they are not just running on any platform, on some Intel base that is going to fail sometimes. They trust that they are going to have 99.9% reliability. They are going to have customers satisfied who are accessing those new services that IBM is implementing. They just trust in Power, really trust in them for their reliability.

We're able to streamline and clone our systems. All of our systems on the floor do the exact same thing, and that works for us.