IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers vs. Microsoft Azure

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud bare metal servers are cloud servers configurable in hourly/monthly options, on-demand, from any location—with a selection of standard features and services for small businesses and enterprise demands. Users can customize RAM and SSDs with 11M+ configurations from which to choose.
$0.51
per hour
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Pricing
IBM Cloud Bare Metal ServersMicrosoft Azure
Editions & Modules
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
starting at $0.51
per hour
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
starting at $241.00
per month
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud Bare Metal ServersMicrosoft Azure
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsIBM Bare Metal Servers offer a choice between hourly or monthly pre-configured servers or can be customized with single to quad processing solutions. Bare metal servers are available worldwide and with no monthly contracts. Amonthly bare metal server built to spec can be ordered and made available in two to four hours—with 500 GB/month outbound bandwidth included. An hourly bare metal server can be ordered, and it is made ready for in 20 to 30 minutes. Public outbound bandwidth is charged per gigabyte.The free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud Bare Metal ServersMicrosoft Azure
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Chose IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
The servers themselves are a commodity product. Dell is Dell, HP is HP. When comparing vendors for this service, you are looking at price, SLA, and easy of use for support.
Microsoft Azure

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IBM Cloud Bare Metal ServersMicrosoft Azure
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
8.6
79 Ratings
6% above category average
Microsoft Azure
8.6
17 Ratings
6% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.077 Ratings8.716 Ratings
Dynamic scaling8.861 Ratings9.316 Ratings
Elastic load balancing8.951 Ratings8.816 Ratings
Pre-configured templates8.457 Ratings7.116 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.470 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.861 Ratings8.415 Ratings
Operating system support8.676 Ratings9.516 Ratings
Security controls8.874 Ratings9.016 Ratings
Automation7.57 Ratings8.715 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud Bare Metal ServersMicrosoft Azure
Small Businesses
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Cloud Bare Metal ServersMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(81 ratings)
8.5
(88 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(15 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(9 ratings)
8.8
(27 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(23 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud Bare Metal ServersMicrosoft Azure
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
Well suited - 1) To Install required Products/Software in a middleware technology 2) Customize the file system and size of the storage 3) Install required monitoring tools like Tivoli, Splunk, etc. Less appropriate - 1) Maybe for SAAS products that do not require all of the installations.
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Microsoft
In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.
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Pros
IBM
  • Performance - the servers perform really well, even under stress. We have some long build processes running concurrently, and the server [can] serve other applications without any problems.
  • Secure - for the most part, the servers are very secure and IBM provides many tools to help [make] sure the servers stay that way.
  • Highly Available - while we have experienced various downtimes and outages with other IBM Cloud offerings, so far, we have not experienced any with [IBM Cloud] Bare Metal Servers.
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Microsoft
  • Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
  • Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
  • BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
  • Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.
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Cons
IBM
  • [In my experience, the] Customer Service Agreement (CSA) has many gaps in terms of responsibility with Bare Metal Servers.
  • [I believe] IBM should be deploying servers and firmware updating all components before providing them to customers to prevent component failure.
  • [I feel] IBM needs lots of improvement with their legacy VPN to access IMPI management tools. The level of security of it is unparalleled when it works. Having access to KVM / IPMI is critical for any business, and when their VPN service is not working.
  • [From my experiences,] IBM deployed faulty hardware, or failed to update firmware per Lenovo notices, only to pass off blame.
  • [In my opinion,] IBM's General Counsel and Paralegal held our data/company hostage when components failed, [in my experience] to IBM "gross negligence" (in their words), only to release it if we were to limit damages to $1,000.
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Microsoft
  • In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
  • Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
  • Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
Due to cloud computing taking over the market, I have moved to cloud computing. It is so much easier upgrading or downsizing a virtual server on the cloud vs bare metal. I find it way more convenient on cloud computing. The provisioning takes way too long for bare metal servers.
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Microsoft
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
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Usability
IBM
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Support Rating
IBM
Great responsiveness and detailed know-how from the team. Self Explanatory and good resources on the Web to resolve issues. Good communication on issues via email. Good response times on issues which arise and where we have received support from the IBM support team. We believe that IBM is a great Partner to base our IT applications and we believe that a critical infrastructure like a cloud backend will be well served if we continue to base it on IBM.
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Microsoft
Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.
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Implementation Rating
IBM
The implementation of this software took place as we planned. The performance time taken for full functionality was very reliable with positive results. The customer support team was the best team I have ever met in my career experience. They are always with timely responses when reached to offer any help.
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Microsoft
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
The Best part of this IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers is performance and a very highly usable part is Security stuff. everyone needs to secure their data and work with a smoothly running app. for this reason I select this server rather than another one. I will use it in feature [definitely].
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Microsoft
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
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Return on Investment
IBM
  • Future readiness--we have the ability to quickly respond and build custom demos for customers in a short timeframe.
  • Savings on hardware--we have the ability to spin up large workloads to demonstrate to customers the performance of our tools and IBM Cloud.
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Microsoft
  • Brings down Capex to customers.
  • Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
  • Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.
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ScreenShots

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Screenshots

Screenshot of ConfiguringScreenshot of Bandwidth ProvisioningScreenshot of Remote ManagementScreenshot of Firmware Management