Item: IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Rating: 9
Author: Venkat Charan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a cloud gaming based company. So we use highly-configured bare-metal servers with GPUs across the organization. We were able to utilize the entire performance of the hardware since bare metal servers are single-tenant, unlike virtual cloud servers.

Pros and Cons

High performance backed by single-tenant sharing.
Cheaper than public virtual servers by around 60%.

Initial set-up times are high! It's rare, but they do take around 30 hours.
Not a good option to run temporary workloads while scaling up.

Return on Investment

We saved around 45% of our expenditure with Bare Metal Servers.
We had more hardware efficiency since they use a single-tenant system.

IBM Bare Metal Servers High Performance

We continuously stream a VM on the Bare Metal Servers for our users to game on. The servers are backed by the latest hardware such as the Nvidia V100s to render and stream the application data to the user. We have never experienced any system hang even when we running our weekly maintenance that takes a lot of computing power.

IBM Bare Metal Servers Provisioning

We were using Cloud Virtual Servers before and their provision times were around 30-50 min on an average. Now, our Bare Metal Servers take at least 6+ hours to be provisioned. However, this might be because our servers involve graphics cards and this isn't commonly used by everyone. But that initial long wait is worth it. Since we've started using Bare Metal Servers, one can save at least 50% of the costs and there are additional benefits such as free bandwidth options and single-tenant systems.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google Compute Engine

IBM Bare Metal Servers are super configurable. It's very easy to tailor them to your needs. The pricing is super cheap and they do come with included 20TB of free data transfer. For our company, we choose IBM Bare Metal Servers because they support GPU servers, unlike the competition. On the other hand, GCP and AWS are expensive and have rigidly defined bare
metal configurations.

Other Software Used

Stripe, Mailchimp, Intercom, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

Bare Metal Servers are extraordinary while running calculated workloads. Let's say for example, that your business caters 1 million users a month and you need 8 servers to handle the load. When you have a clear cut requirement like this, a business can move from Virtual Cloud servers to Bare Metal servers and this will help them push out extra performance and even reduce the cloud costs by more than half. It is not well suited when you have to provision extra servers because of the temporary surge in traffic or resources.

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for high performance computing

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers