IBM Cloud review by communicAVIA
Updated November 19, 2021
IBM Cloud review by communicAVIA
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
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. 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.
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Feature Ratings
IBM Bare Metal Servers Bandwidth, Pricing Billing and Efficiency
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.