IBM, Lenovo, HPE and Huawei Top ITIC Sever and Server OS Reliability Poll

BOSTON - March 28, 2019 - PRLog -- ITIC Survey finds 85 percent of enterprises require 99.99% of per server/per annum reliability

ITIC (https://itic-corp.com/), which provides research and consulting on technology and business topics, today announced that for the 11th straight year, the IBM Z and IBM Power Systems achieved the highest server reliability rankings with Lenovo's x86 servers portfolio, including ThinkSystem, delivering the best uptime among all x86 servers for the sixth year in a row.  Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Integrity and Huawei's KunLun mission critical servers continue to make impressive gains and have also moved ahead in reliability.

The ITIC independent annual, Web-based survey polled over 1,000 businesses worldwide from October 2018 through January 2019.  It compared the reliability and availability of 18 different server platforms and one dozen operating system (OS) distributions.  To obtain the most accurate and unbiased results, ITIC accepted no vendor sponsorship.

"Server reliability is imperative.  Systems and networks are increasingly interconnected.  Outages of even a few minutes disrupt productivity and negatively impact the bottom line," said Laura DiDio, ITIC Principal Analyst. "The cost of hourly downtime continues to soar," she added.  "An 86% majority of ITIC survey respondents say a single hour of downtime costs over $300,000, and 34% of all firms say the cost now tops one million."

IBM's Z is in a class of its own: 83% of respondents said their firms achieved five and six nines – 99.999% and 99.9999% – or greater uptime; that's about 8.8 seconds annually due to inherent flaws in the server or component parts.

Among mainstream servers, IBM POWER8 and IBM POWER9, along with the Lenovo x86 servers including Lenovo ThinkSystem; HPE Integrity; and Huawei's mission critical KunLun servers delivered the highest levels of uptime.  Each platform averaged just under or approximately two (2) minutes of unplanned per annum/per server downtime due to inherent quality issues involving the server or components like hard disk or memory flaws.

IBM and Lenovo executives offered their perspective on the ITIC reliability poll results.

"For our clients, the security and reliability of IBM Z and IBM Power Systems are essential building blocks for high-performance workloads from core banking transactions, to AI and Blockchain," said Jamie Thomas, General Manager, Strategy and Development, IBM Systems. "As our clients enter Chapter 2 of digital transformation, IBM Systems are best positioned to support the AI and Hybrid Cloud agenda."

"Uptime and reliability are critical to running efficient data centers.  Unplanned downtime often has significant impact to an organization's bottom line, costing up to $400K per hour," said Kirk Skaugen, President, Lenovo and Executive Vice President, Lenovo Data Center Group.  "For six consecutive years, Lenovo's x86 servers including the ThinkSystem server portfolio have received the highest reliability marks – comparable to larger-scale mainframe class competitive systems. The Lenovo ThinkSystem portfolio, paired with our services expertise, lets our customers achieve mission critical reliability and security and price/performance from their high-volume x86 systems."

Among the other top survey findings:

·         Availability: The IBM Z and IBM Power Systems, Lenovo's x86 server portfolio, HPE Integrity and Huawei KunLun all provided the highest levels of server, application and service availability.  That is, when the servers did experience an outage due to an inherent system flaw, they were of the shortest duration – typically one-to-five minutes.

·         Technical Support: Businesses gave high marks to IBM, Lenovo, HPE, Huawei and Dell tech support.  Eight-in-10 respondents rated IBM and Lenovo support as "Excellent" or "Very Good."  Only 1% of IBM and Lenovo customers and 3% of HPE and Huawei users gave those vendors "Poor" or "Unsatisfactory" customer support ratings.

·         Hard Drive Failures Most Common Technical Server Flaw: Faulty hard drives are the chief culprits in inherent server reliability/quality issues (58%) followed by Motherboard issues (43%) and processor problems (38%).

·         IBM, Lenovo and Huawei KunLun Servers Had Fewest Hard Drive Failures: IBM, Lenovo and Huawei's KunLun platforms experienced the fewest hard drive quality or failure issues among all of the server distributions within the first one, two and three years of service.  Less than one percent – 0.4% – of IBM Z, for example, experienced technical problems with their hard drives in the first year of usage, followed by IBM Power Systems and Lenovo System x with one percent (1%) each during the first 12 months of deployment.

·         External Issues Negatively Affect Reliability: End User Carelessness (74%), Human Error (59%) and Security (51%) are the top external causes of downtime and unanticipated reasons for taking servers offline.

For further information or to purchase copies of the full Report contact jessica@jhmpr.com or ldidio@itic-corp.com.

About Laura DiDio and ITIC

Laura DiDio (http://itic-corp.com/about/) is founder and Principal Analyst of ITIC which provides research and consulting on technology and business topics.  DiDio has over 20 years experience as an analyst and reporter with firms including, 451 Research, Yankee Group, Giga Information Group, Computerworld and Network World.  DiDio also worked as an investigative reporter for various national broadcasting and print outlets, including CNN and Channel 5 News in New York.  Her investigative reports have appeared in The Village Voice and The Minneapolis Star and Tribune.