Mission critical server and server OS distributions from IBM, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei and Cisco continue to deliver the highest levels of inherent reliability, availability and security among 18 different hardware platforms.
The technical and business challenges posed by the ongoing global pandemic didn’t compromise the core reliability of IBM, Lenovo, Huawei, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Cisco servers. The top five most reliable server platforms managed to improve their uptime and availability despite confronting a wide range of challenges including a spike in security and data breaches; supply chain issues and management issues associated with hybrid workforces.
Those are the findings of ITIC’s latest 2021-2022 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability survey. The independent Web-based study, polled 1,000 corporations across 28 vertical market segments worldwide on the reliability, performance and security of the most popular server platforms from July 2021 until mid-January 2022.
Once again, IBM’s Z and LinuxONE III platforms and IBM’s mission critical Power servers achieved the highest server hardware reliability while also delivering the strongest server security among 18 different platforms.
The IBM distributions were followed closely by Lenovo’s ThinkSystem servers, which posted the highest recorded uptime among all Intel x 86 servers and Huawei’s KunLun and Fusion platforms. The HPE Superdome and the Cisco UCS hardware (in that order), rounded out the top five most reliable vendor hardware platforms.
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The IBM z14 and z15 and the LinuxONE III recorded their personal best and industry-best reliability scores: recording just 0.55 seconds of per server unplanned downtime. The IBM Power models also achieved their best uptime scores, with just 1.42 minutes of unplanned per server downtime, down from 1.49 per server/per annum minutes in ITIC’s 2021 Reliability study. The Lenovo ThinkSystem and Huawei KunLun platforms followed closely, each with 1.49 minutes of unplanned per server outages, down from 1.51 per minutes in ITIC’s prior reliability survey in 2021. Cisco UCS hardware recorded 2.1 minutes of unplanned per server outage, down from 2.3 minutes a year ago. Inspur scored in the midrange of server platforms notching the same 11 minutes of unplanned per server, per annum downtime as they experienced in 2021. The Dell PowerEdge servers likewise registered the same 26 minutes of unplanned downtime per server unavailability as they recorded last year. Unbranded White box servers (which often run unlicensed or pirated software) again were the least reliable servers holding steady at 57 minutes of unplanned per server downtime compared to 2021.
The IBM Z servers and the LinuxONE III platform are in a class by themselves, a 96% majority of IBM Z customers said their businesses achieved unparalleled fault tolerant levels of seven nines – 99.99999% reliability and continuous availability, the best among all server distributions. This is an increase of two percent (2%) – compared with the 94% of survey respondent organizations in ITIC’s 2021 reliability poll. The IBM Power distributions also garnered high reliability ratings; 93% of corporate enterprises said the Power9 and latest Power10 models which began shipping in September 2021, deliver a minimum of five and six nines availability/uptime. The Lenovo ThinkSystem, Huawei KunLun and HPE Superdome servers were close behind. Some 93% of Lenovo ThinkSystem enterprises said their businesses achieve a minimum of five and six nines server reliability; followed by 92% of respondents who estimated the HPE Superdome and Huawei KunLun hardware delivered five and six nines of uptime. Cisco Systems UCS servers – many of which are deployed at the network edge, continues to gain ground on the leaders as Cisco continues to fortify security. Some 90% of Cisco UCS customers said the platform delivered 99.999% or five nines of uptime.
For questions and comments contact: Ldidio@itic-corp.com.
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