IBM Power Systems customers are at a crossroads. They face hefty annual support costs for older models, whether it’s Power8 Systems (released in 2014), or 5,6,7, 7+ which have reached IBM end-of-service, or Power9 Systems many of which may be beyond their support-included period. IBM customers are under pressure to upgrade to the next Power Systems iteration, Power10 (first model released in September 2021), and must decide what to do next.

Oracle Exadata presents a compelling opportunity for these customers to consolidate a large portion of their workloads – their Oracle Databases – on a future-proof, optimized platform. Exadata can meet their most stringent performance, uptime, and security requirements while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). Customers’ existing applications can continue to run on a much smaller Power Systems footprint at much lower support or upgrade costs. Customers can also begin their cloud migration or complete it with Exadata Cloud@Customer in their data center (or in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions) with Autonomous Database Service and Exadata Database Service.

An unclear future for Power Systems

Customers have valid reasons to worry about Power Systems future and consider alternatives. Power Systems have suffered mostly double-digit sales declines for 9 straight quarters and their share of the server market is approaching a negligible 1%. Customers may be facing a scarcity of Power Systems experts, new tools, and software given this shrinking presence. IBM leadership’s announcements to pivot investment to growth segments only add to future uncertainty.

IT transformation strategies and Exadata alternatives

Customers will want Power Systems alternatives to fit within their digital transformation strategies that seek to redeploy IT resources away from infrastructure integration so they can focus on higher value-added tasks. Customers with public cloud or on-premises cloud strategies will find a full range of Exadata options to meet their diverse needs:

  • Exadata Database Machine is uniquely co-engineered and optimized for Oracle Database as a factory-integrated system with server, storage, network, virtualization, operating system, middleware, database, and unified full-stack management, all in one. It frees IT from most system integration, performance optimization, and life cycle tasks for on-premises systems.
  • Exadata Database Service provides high performance, scalability, availability, and security in OCI regions worldwide. It provides full functional compatibility with Oracle Exadata on-premises solutions so customers can easily move operations to the cloud when needed.
  • Exadata Cloud@Customer delivers the power of Autonomous Database Service and Exadata Database Service running concurrently on the same infrastructure in customers’ data centers so organizations have maximum compatibility with OCI solutions. Customers use OCI automation to simplify database lifecycle management. They obtain full data residency and only pay for the database compute cycles they consume.
  • Autonomous Database services, with machine-learning automation, run on Exadata infrastructure in OCI or on Exadata Cloud@Customer systems in customer data centers. Autonomous Database frees DBA teams from having to tune, scale, backup, and secure their databases – enabling them to focus on adding value at the application or schema level.

Comparing Exadata to Power Systems

Customers will want to compare Exadata to Power Systems in meeting their key objectives for database performance, availability, security, management and operations, and TCO.

Exadata vs. Power Systems

Performance

Exadata X9M:

  • 22 million IOPS, 19µ second latency, 1050 GB/sec throughput per rack
  • Co-engineered capabilities with intelligent storage servers
  • Independent scaling of compute and storage to 18 total racks

Power9 & 10 Systems:

  • Only servers. No full-system Oracle Database performance data
  • Server & storage components of a likely full system have much lower performance and scalability for Oracle Database based on industry data:
    • x86 servers outperform Power9 servers, per Prowess analysis2
    • Dell EMC flagship all-flash PowerMax 8000 storage rack claims 7.5m. IOPs, 100µ second latency, 175 GB/s throughput per rack with scalability to 2 racks. Exadata performance advantage: 2x IOPs, 5x lower latency, 3x throughput, 9x scaling

 

Advantage: Exadata

Availability

Exadata:

  • Highest full-system availability, IDC AL4 rated3
  • Full-system patching maintains high availability

Power:

  • Only servers. No full-system availability metrics
  • Multi-vendor design, patching creates uptime risks

 

Advantage: Exadata

Security

Exadata:

  • Full-stack, database-optimized, extremely high security configuration
  • Full-stack patching maintains the very high security
  • Maximum Security Architecture

Power:

  • Only servers. No full-system security assurance
  • Multi-vendor design and patching creates potential security risks

 

Advantage: Exadata

 

 

 

 

Management and operations

Exadata:

  • Integrated, full-stack management
  • Full-stack patching with minimal testing requirements
  • Single support, single patching
  • Cloud@Customer and Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer reduce administration

Power:

  • Multiple management consoles for different vendors’ components
  • Multi-vendor complexity of support and patching
  • No autonomous database options

 

Advantage: Exadata

Total cost of ownership (TCO)

Exadata:

  • Exadata Cloud@Customer delivers $1.9M of benefits per year with a 256% return on investment1
  • 47% reduction in operational costs with Exadata Cloud@Customer1

 

Power:

  • High integration, optimization, and operational costs of multi-vendor full system, including support and patching

 

Advantage: Exadata

 

Exadata vs. Power Systems: Other points to consider:

Performance

  • Exadata’s unmatched performance results from unique, Exadata-only database-to-hardware co-engineering, such as direct CPU access to persistent memory for ultra-low latency, offloading SQL processing to storage, active-active networks, and many other innovations
  • Power9 claims faster cores than x86, but x86 has twice the number of cores. A 2-socket x86 server can deliver 51% higher Oracle OLTP performance than a 2-socket Power9 server according to Prowess2

Availability

  • Exadata ensures very high availability with completely redundant hardware components and built-in protection against failure at all levels of the full software and hardware stack
  • Power Systems customers must assume the burden of successfully designing full-stack availability and avoiding outages from misconfigurations and mispatching across vendors

Security

  • Exadata designs in the highest security in concert across full-stack components and restricts services and configurations only to their most essential needed just to run database
  • Power Systems customers own the burden of designing in and maintaining full-stack security in a general-purpose system with a large diversity of configurations and services

Customer Story: Lalux: A move to cloud while keeping data sovereignty

 

A better choice for database consolidation

IBM Power Systems customers who are considering a system refresh or paying very high support costs for older systems can consolidate a major portion of their workloads— their Oracle databases— on Oracle Exadata. They will achieve unmatched performance, availability, and security while slashing operating costs. Their IBM Power Systems footprint will shrink. Exadata’s public cloud, cloud on-premises, and ML driven Autonomous Database options will enable them to make faster progress on their digital transformation strategies.

CTA: Learn why IDC says organizations using Oracle Exadata raise their ROI and gain faster time to market. 

Footnotes

1Exadata Cloud at Customer Optimizes Database Performance, Reduces Operational Costs and Contributes to Better Business Results. Harsh Singh, Richard L. Villars, Natalya Yezhkova. IDC, September 2019. https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/engineered-systems/exadata/idc-exacc-customer-interviews-complete-version.pdf

2Comparing the TCO of Running Oracle® Database on Intel Versus IBM® Power Systems. Prowess Consulting, 2020. https://prowesscorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/190153-Intel-Oracle-IAvIBM-comparison-Final-v4.pdf

3Worldwide AL4 Server Market Shares, 2019: Fault-Tolerant Systems Become Digital Transformation Platforms. Paul Maguranis, Peter Rutten. IDC, 2020. https://oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/database/idc-al4-servers.pdf