IBM Power vs. IBM Z

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Power
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The IBM Power product line is a family of servers.N/A
IBM Z
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
IBM Z is the company's mainframe enterprise server solution product line.N/A
Pricing
IBM PowerIBM Z
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM PowerIBM Z
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM PowerIBM Z
Best Alternatives
IBM PowerIBM Z
Small Businesses
Dell PowerEdge
Dell PowerEdge
Score 10.0 out of 10
Dell PowerEdge
Dell PowerEdge
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
HPE ProLiant DL
HPE ProLiant DL
Score 5.9 out of 10
HPE ProLiant DL
HPE ProLiant DL
Score 5.9 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Z
IBM Z
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Power
IBM Power
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM PowerIBM Z
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(0 ratings)
4.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.4
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM PowerIBM Z
Likelihood to Recommend
Large-scale data centers that place a premium on high performance, dependability, and scalability benefit greatly from IBM Power servers. They are perfect for hosting vital databases, virtualized workloads, and applications. Organizations like ours dealing with big data analytics, data warehousing, and AI/machine learning workloads benefit from Power servers' ability to process and analyze vast datasets efficiently.
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We found its Data processing marvelous, and its benefit to accomplish chores in time gives us high authenticity and availability to the data deposit with accelerated admittance. One thing I will say that try to make it more user-friendly as it is difficult to learn. We liked it overall; Working is very good.
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Pros
  • The systems are physically able to keep the systems operating and producing.
  • The AIX operating system is stable and secure both Firmware and Software.
  • IBM Power servers support many applications for the customer re: Oracle, DB2, and many Power grid systems.
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  • Transactional processing, including data entry across multiple departments
  • Reporting on massive amounts of data, due to its scale and size of processing capabilities
  • Analytics on data as there are various accelerators for both IBM's databases and others such as Oracle
  • Security is another major benefit to this platform as it contains a non-open systems design
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Cons
  • A solid IDE for editing programs. SEU was simple and solid. Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve. That's fine. But RDi is expensive and shaky at best, and VS Code, while free, is severely lacking even the modicum of features RDi has.
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  • IBM needs to add more focus on simplifying mainframe usage and management.
  • Most modern programmers interface with the Z using an IDE. However, performing many tasks, such as cataloging a data set or checking on a job status, can require switching to the ISPF interface. Users want to interface with a GUI, not a function-key, menu and character-based interface like ISPF. Anything that can simplify and modernize interfacing with the mainframe should be a high priority for IBM.
  • The IBM Z platform is one of the most instrumented computing platforms in the world, so there are a lot of metrics that could be automatically analyzed and used to improve the performance and management of the mainframe environment.
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Likelihood to Renew
This is one of the best systems on the market. You can have Flash/Copy which created another LPAR to look like the system you are copying. This takes seconds and not minutes. Then you can use BRNS to do full system backups nightly with no downtime. I am ready for us to upgrade to a Power 10.
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The IBM Z mainframe capabilities are unmatched for cloud readiness and optimization the learning capabilities are matched perfectly with Watson and the expandability of the cloud makes it a perfect choice.
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Usability
IBM Power allows us to host and scale up to 32TB of Virtual Machine (VM). We were earlier limited to 12TB per single VM, and could only scale-out (or horizontally). Since some of our solutions are extensively memory intensive, we wanted to host larger VM.We are SAP only shop, given some SAP solutions are memory intensive and some industries need to exploit 'memory intensive' IBM Power was the only choice to scale architecture beyond 12TB memory with support for High Availability design as well! This has drastically improved the time we had to spend on optimizing the applications, solution and database.
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pay as you go pricing
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Reliability and Availability
In all of the years I have used various Power System, I have never had any problems at all. Even when hackers were attacking our email servers and many users PCs, the IBM Power System came out completely unscathed. I haven't even had any application errors that were able to take the system down. Nor have I ever experienced an unplanned outage
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The Z in IBM Z is for zero down time. If you configure your system according to IBM's best practices, you can achieve zero downtime
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Performance
The IBM Power System is built for integration. It supports multiple operating systems and you can run multiple OS's on the same box with no problems at all. It also supports a number of open source languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Perl which helps you continue to grow and integrate with lots of other systems.
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Performance is a major part when you configure your system. IBM has many tools to study your system and suggest the appropriate configuration. With the right contract, you can add processing power dynamically and remove it when no longer needed
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Support Rating
On large-scale systems, the rating would have been 10. However, I have seen some cases in more rural areas where the IBM onsite support is not as available or of the highest quality as in the past. For software support, there are sometimes instances of language barriers.
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Support is usually superb, only occasionally dropping to very good. We participate in some of the CD (Continuous Delivery) aspects of z/OS, IMS, MQ, and DB2.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
Over my 33 years on this platform, I attended many in person courses, conferences, and other training opportunities.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
There are many online courses from both IBM and other vendors. Most are great. All of the documentation is available online.
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Implementation Rating
Systems are robust and you need to know exactly what your are going to do with them. There are multiple configurations possible and you need to gather your requirements first, before going on with the implementation. Tuning is a must before migrating production systems
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I do not personally have any key insights regarding implementation of IBM Z Enterprise Servers as that is what our mainframe architects do.
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Alternatives Considered
Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others... Power server do not need to have release often power server are much more strong then other manufacturer Power server do not need to restart offen
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My answer is yes. This made moving to the cloud much easier. The main benefits of this are latency and data extraction. The speed, security and reliability is the game changer and where it stacks up when compared to other IBM products. Additionally, increasing the workload is also very helpful. Use a single platform to avoid unnecessary activities and actions, help maintain safety, and even recover quickly. Activities that users are unable to continue and complete tasks help avoid mistakes when there are errors related to And because it's perfect for your users, it has less impact on your business. Always ready for backup. I didn't even care about the migrations that were performed.
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Scalability
This system can work in a small factory with a few users and easily scale out to thousands of users. It is truly amazing on how much you can throw at this box and it will just keep humming. It is great for use across multiple departments and even across multiple corporations. I worked at one company where we were hosting multiple corporations on just one large Power System and had ZERO problems.
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If you need more processing power, just add more CPU's or memory. The largest system can have close to 200 CPU's and 40 TB of memory. If that is not enough, you can add more physical computers, and connect them using a sysplex
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Return on Investment
  • IBM Powers servers have consistently delivered uninterrupted operation in our datacenters. They have redundancy and fault tolerance feature ensuring maximum uptime and minimal disruptions.
  • They can handle computationally intensive workloads efficiently, reducing simulation times and enabling faster decision making.
  • They are energy efficient, helping us reduce carbon footprint while delivering top-notch performance.
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  • It has increased the reliability of data which has decreased our dependence on legacy systems.
  • It has no loss while migration which has a positive impact on ROI as we don't have to worry about data loss.
  • It has multi tasking and support for non-cobol applications on mainframe.
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ScreenShots

IBM Power Screenshots

Screenshot of IBM Power E1180Screenshot of IBM Power E1150Screenshot of IBM Power S1124Screenshot of IBM Power S1122