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IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

Overview

What is IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers?

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…

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Recent Reviews

IBM server in shell

8 out of 10
December 20, 2022
Incentivized
we deploy cloud based application on the IBM cloud bare metal servers for cloud communications, different kind off applications works in …
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IBM Cloud VPC - Review

8 out of 10
December 16, 2022
Incentivized
In one of our projects where we had to create a setup of a virtual desktop infrastructure, which was to be created on VMWare, So, due to …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (78)
    9.0
    90%
  • Security controls (75)
    8.8
    88%
  • Operating system support (77)
    8.6
    86%
  • Monitoring tools (71)
    8.5
    85%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

1 video

User Review: Long Time User Impressed with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers' Quality Support
02:23
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Pricing

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IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

starting at $0.51

Cloud
per hour

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

starting at $241.00

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://cloud.ibm.com/gen1/infrastructu…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet

8.6
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers?

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers are single-tenant, dedicated servers that can be deployed and managed as cloud services. They are part of IBM Cloud and are available in either classic or VPC deployment models.


IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers on VPC Infrastructure are dedicated bare metal servers that provide enhanced networking and connectivity via virtual private cloud (VPC) capabilities. They’re available now as an integrated part of IBM Cloud.


IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers on IBM Cloud Classic Infrastructure are presented as ideal for large, steady state, predictable operations that rely on traditional cloud networking. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server can be customized with over 11 million different configuration combinations. IBM includes 20 TB of bandwidth. Pay-as-you-use with hourly, monthly, or reserved billing at prices set for cost management. CPU technology from Intel® Xeon® , and AMD EPYC™ , and add the latest NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are available.

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Features

  • Supported: Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
  • Supported: Dynamic scaling
  • Supported: Elastic load balancing
  • Supported: Pre-configured templates
  • Supported: Monitoring tools
  • Supported: Pre-defined machine images
  • Supported: Operating system support
  • Supported: Security controls

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Screenshots

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

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationMobile Web

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Alibaba Cloud ECS Bare Metal Servers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Rackspace Managed Hosting are common alternatives for IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers.

Reviewers rate Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(180)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as development and testing platform. It turned out that the stability is top notch. We got 100% uptime during last 4 years, so we highly consider it as our production platform too. The platform is no longer supported since it has been discontinued and considered as legacy service, but we still use it by our own risk since the platform is really stable & reliable.
  • Reliable platform, never have any issue with the hardware.
  • Reliable infrastructure, 100% uptime during last 4 years in service.
  • The service price is higher than most competitors but it is worth considering its reliability.
  • Ability to switch OS/platform license to customer's own license without being re-deploy.
  • Procedure for easy hardware refresh (especially hard drive) to ease cloning content to new hard drive. We have a 6 years disk and we very concern about it.
  • Other than that, everything is OK.
The reliability is the keyword. We've recommended this to many partners & customers. Some of them have tried it and like it, they are really pleased with it. Some have tried the service, but discontinue for various reason, but at the end they came back to IBM again since no competitor in the market can offer the same reliability as IBM does.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (8)
50%
5.0
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
100%
10.0
Dynamic scaling
N/A
N/A
Elastic load balancing
N/A
N/A
Pre-configured templates
N/A
N/A
Monitoring tools
100%
10.0
Pre-defined machine images
100%
10.0
Operating system support
100%
10.0
Security controls
N/A
N/A
  • The reliability is the keyword. Never has any issue during 6 years in service.
  • Service pricing is quite higher then the average market price, there was a moment that we were in difficult financial situation and almost couldn't pay the service.
  • After all, the IBM reliability is the main factor that we're still in the business until today.
We're making an AFTM/ACDM (Air Traffic Flow Management/Airport Collaborative Decision Making) system based on IoT and real data processing. We process aircraft data in milliseconds resolution, that about 500 aircraft per second with up to 50 parameters per aircraft. The Bare Metal we use is the benchmark how far our system can be pushed to process air traffic in a real-time. It became the minimum specs for our system.
Frankly, IBM is the fastest we've experienced. Competitors may take days to setup, only IBM can do it within minutes. Our setup is just simple so it can be done within minutes, not hours. We believe that even in our complex scenario, IBM can do in in less than an hour.
When we chose IBM (previously Softlayer), our requirements were simple: a provider that supports platform OS we need, reliable network, geographical presence and price. Based on our research back then, we opted for Softlayer (now IBM). Why did we choose bare metal instead of virtual? Because we have non-standard OS we need to run with custom configuration, so we need to run it on our own hypervisor. That's why we choose bare metal since we have the flexibility to customize the VM.
VMware as the hypervisor, all others are open source products. We use all Debian for our VM.
My subscription has 20TB bandwidth quota. It's alot of bandwidth, we never have worry regarding over-usage of bandwidth with this. Surely, it saves our cost a lot since we don't need to care about adding quota for all of our services.
We pay fixed monthly price, but never have the price reduction during this 7 years of subscription. Perhaps the reduction is for new customer only, not existing subscribers.
9-12 hours time saved per person per week
Our system is complex. When we started develop this system 7 years ago, we don't know how much resources that this system will need. We choose a so-so bare metal that we think it can be used for 3 to 5 years before we upgrade or move to a bigger capacity. But, it turned out that it still enough for our need even after 7 years. It never fail us, we're very pelased with it.
We never use hourly billing since we use monthly fixed pricing.
We haven't tried the virtual server in the same subnet. Our partner, which subscribed to IBM Cloud by our recommendation, tried this feature and it work spelndidly. We know this because they outsourced the system management to us.
The multiple presence around the world is a plus point. For application that requires low latency, this is very convenience. Global internet traffic annot be predicted, that's why nowaday CDN services are commonly used bya many content providers. But, how about application that need dynamic interaction that cannot be cached using CDN? Opening application mirror in multiple datacenters atound the globe will be reuired. Having IBM Cloud provides multiple presence around the globe is a good news for anyone who need to deploy low latency application globally.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We started using this service around 2012 as a solution to host multiple websites, when SoftLayer was not yet part of IBM. We use this service exclusively for this purpose. This service solves our necessity to host multiple websites on a secure environment. We use 5 bare metal servers for this purpose.
  • Professional and proactive tech support.
  • Great performance on servers.
  • Nice interface to manage the infrastructure and services.
  • Sometimes Chat support is not very useful.
  • Some services are expensive if you compare them with cloud infrastructure.
Even when cloud is far more practical and sometimes cheaper today, Bare Metal Servers has its advantages. For example, if you have CPU or GPU intensive applications that need to be used constantly, that will be more expensive on some cloud providers. We found in our experience that we can have a server deployed in a matter of hours. And with a very good technical support provided by actual people, something that you can't get always on a cloud provider.

But if you need to host websites, even if you are a reseller, it's hard to recommend.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (4)
77.5%
7.8
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
100%
10.0
Monitoring tools
70%
7.0
Operating system support
70%
7.0
Security controls
70%
7.0
  • This service helps us to have a professional hosting service in less than a week.
  • We had to get quality hardware in a professional managed data center. The cost was higher than if we had had an in-house solution, but totally worth it.
  • The higher cost vs cloud was a factor to switch to another cloud provider.
We started our journey on this service looking for a professional web hosting service. As time passed, we used one server to host a Kaltura Open server, which transcoded and served video files. And it worked perfectly. The performance in the servers in general was always great.

Other server that had intensive usage was a Database server, that served more than 20 different databases for several websites and it worked perfect, even on heavy load times.
That is fast compared with other services. We used to wait up to a week on other providers to get a server deployed. When we first contacted the service (circa 2012), we were in awe of the speed they managed to provision a new server.

That speed also applies to the provision of new additional services (for example dedicated firewall).
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Cloud vs Bare Metal is a tough call. We chose EC2 to move our solution from IBM because we needed more flexibility. I believe that the choice of one or the other solution must be thought through very carefully. Neither of those is heaven. For us, the change comes in the necessity to have more websites available and to support more web technologies, for example, ElasticSearch.

Bare Metal doesn't have the flexibility of the cloud, that's a given, but sometimes it's better.

On a Bare Metal infrastructure, it requires you to request a new server and configure it, which is not always easy, especially if you want to just test some tech. That's the point when Cloud was big win for us. We can test it without needing to set up a server on our own.

But, if you need a more permanent application, probably you will want a Bare Metal server, tuned to your application.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google Cloud CDN, Brightcove
This change barely helped us, since we moved web assets to S3/Cloudfront to save bandwidth before these changes. Our bandwidth usage was low after that.
At least as we've known, that price reduction was only for new servers, not existing ones. We had 5 servers, so to get that discount we needed to configure 5 new servers and for one month pay 10 servers, while we move data from one server to another. So, for us at least, that was not a very exciting prospect.
I don’t know how much time was saved
We use one server to host a Kaltura Open server. That particular server transcoded and served videos. We notice that even when the task was intensive, we get several video renditions ready after a few minutes, matching speed of other dedicated services like Brightcove.

So, not only was it efficient, it also was fast, because we were able to set up that solution on the same day as we ordered the server.
As we use the servers for web hosting and we needed to have the servers up 24/7, we don't use hourly billing.
The management interface is just great. Even when we use it only for Bare Metal Servers, it's easy to monitor and manage the servers there.
Editing Firewall rules, accessing the KVM management, restart, and monitor server status were the more common tasks that we do, and it just worked perfect.
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