IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

Being used as our primary production for our Web Apps, Internal Facing Apps, and our database warehouse.

Not all applications make sense in cloud, which is why it is nice to have access to bare metal solutions as well as cloud based solutions. We achieve operational efficiency by keeping our 24hr / 365 day workloads and compute needs on bare metal

It is on par with other solutions when comparing servers of equal size.

For the most part, implementation of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers went smoothly, however we learned that the location you select will greatly impact the quality of service and availability. Several data center locations are being decommissioned (they are older / legacy from previous acquisitions) and others are simply at capacity. Strongly suggest confirming with their technical folks regarding capacity planning before starting a migration or implementation.

We were migrating from one type of high availability firewall to a newer more capable kind. Doing so traditionally would involved either downtime or having our environment exposed with no firewall protection. The IBM Support team was able to closely coordinate times (not a 9-5 window) and help us generate a process so that when the new firewalls spun up traffic was blocked by default.

It wouldn't change. Bare metal is a simple procurement process.

No. Found it unnecessary most of time since reboots and KVM is self service.

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers were being used at all levels of our infrastructure. The uniqueness of IBM's offering bridges hardware and global networks into a nice package. IBM is unique as it has the ability to bind IP addresses that can float across any data center region to allow for fault-tolerant applications bound by a static IP regardless of geographic location. IBM's [and formerly Softlayer's] global private network allows for data centers to interact and communicate between regions without requiring VPN or other networking tools. Allowing your application to scale globally while physically limiting intra-networking on a private VLAN prevents many other challenges of securing private data. [I feel] in the telecom space, port 5060 SIP is a widely known and 'attackable' port. While you want to allow your customers access wherever they may be, keeping 'bad actors' away can be a challenge at scale. Our platform was physically built for the IBM Cloud to scale within its private network, keeping the intra-workings between all components private while only allowing known customers access on an independent transport bound to an IP that could self-heal and migrate into any global region on the IBM Cloud autonomously.

The machines performed quite well while working until they didn't [in my experience].

While base servers start at very high performance, offloading application workloads into IBM Cloud would be beneficial. Keeping in mind the cost of [computing] is greater than other vendors. The benefit of offloading workload in the IBM Cloud should be calculated based on its dependency on other network of specialty driven capability of IBM Cloud.

Compute performance does not have benefit over other compute offerings based on price alone.

[In my experience,] this is not the case [and] provisioning took at least 8 hours the first time. [In my experience,] over 16 hours when [the] system failed and had to [rebuilt.] There may be new provisions in place due to our event that requires firmware updating on all components before delivery which now can take machines to be provisioned in far longer times. [I feel] there is no 2-4 hour delivery time.

One new server we deployed took, [in our experience] almost 48 hours to deliver, however, we experienced boot failures and were only able to get into the operating system while selecting the boot disk device manually at start up. This means in the event of a failure or reboot, the system would not recover to OS. IBM helpdesk made bios adjustments beyond what is allowed within the IMPI management, however, the system never booted properly. Had to cancel months later.

Implementation on some equipment was smooth. [In my experience,] deployment time always exceeded advertised time. In one instance, our server deployment took almost 48 hours when (2-4 hour deployment time was advertised). However [it] never booted correctly and after several attempts to have IBM support repair, we had to cancel those servers.

I believe deployment times have been updated more accurately now to reflect 24-48 hour deployment times.

We did not purchase additional support initially, however on future servers, we did add premium support and insurance.

[In my experience,] No.

IBM VPC is being used currently as a proof of concept and a training platform - our business relies on enabling other companies to achieve their own technology goals, and with cloud migrations currently big business, we make it ours to be aware of the current state of cloud provider offerings. IBM is a vital part of this. Thus through prototyping potential solutions and building on our own cloud platform knowledge, we are in a better position to help clients to make the right purchasing decisions for their business, and to help them to implement it.

I was very impressed by getting IBM Cloud's VPC offering up and running - I endeavour to do everything through CLI tools where available as this lends itself to future automation, and is easier to document then endless GUI screenshots. I found IBM's documentation easy to navigate (though confess I found all the pieces I needed through Google than via IBM Cloud's own documentation search), and I was able to go from zero knowledge to achieving what I needed within a couple of hours.

Without IBM Cloud's support, we would never even have gotten our proof of concept off the ground as for reasons unknown, our account wouldn't validate (in spite of being populated with all our details correctly). IBM Cloud support responded very rapidly and got us over the hurdle, meaning we were up and running quickly and able to complete our proof of concept within a day.

We used it to create a high-availability cluster

In my experience, the implementation on a Bare-Metal Server is really fast because is often the case that IBM Cloud (Softlayer) already has the server on site. The only thing they do is they load the OS, modify the IP, change the uEFI credentials, and that's it; but of course all of that is already automated. In my case I prefer to load the OS myself so my servers are ready to use in minutes (from the moment I order one to the moment I get to install the OS).

We had a disk failure in a RAID array and the tech in site was aware of the problem and he already had the new disk on site by the time we contacted support. We proceeded to select a time to make the change without any issue.

We use IBM Cloud VPC to host our SP application for data collection, and to be the backend for a couple of web apps. It is being used across the whole organization. We are resolving the document collaboration and management system issues that we had, and this helps our company because it provides an efficient and cost-effective solution for meeting our company's needs for speed, cost, and reliability. IBM Cloud VPC is versatile enough that it meets needs across several different use cases.

Implementation went well and managing cloud resources were done as expected. It takes time as expected but depend on your environment.

Sometime need support in configuration of environment. they helped us to complete the configuration we were trying to accomplish.