IBM Bare Metal is affordable but only if you have a smaller footprint
December 25, 2020

IBM Bare Metal is affordable but only if you have a smaller footprint

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

[IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers] is currently being used across the whole organization for delivery of all of our products across a standard platform both within the continental United States and Europe and Asia. It allows for performances to be met at a generally cost-effective price point so we can deliver our products consistently, continuously, and stably.

Pros

  • Multiple processor options close to the latest offerings from Intel.
  • Many options of RAM for different memory requirements.
  • Multiple RAID arrays and disk options for the customers to configure.

Cons

  • Firmware upgrades are not always easy to perform and can be required at unusual time intervals at different datacenters.
  • No networking monitoring is available.
  • Changes on the IBM side can cause an outage, so you MUST plan for redundancy when building out.
  • It has been very positive as our footprint has managed to stay small due to the boxes performance.
  • The only downside is the occasional outage, usually driven by a change.
  • Support can be hit or miss in recent years.
The AWS Bare Metal is a non-starter. $5000 for a "weaker" server than IBM offers and way, way, more configuration. GCP is still on-boarding their bare-metal solutions. The other places, such as digital ocean or rackspace tend to be pricier and you get less power. The only other alternative is to run your own data center which is a lot of resources and capital.
Heavier usage of processor and/or memory with higher network requirements. Such as a robust, vertical database cluster or a robust Redis cluster. Their bare metal offerings are very suited for these use-cases as well as data-science requirements for modeling servers. Basically, anything that requires a large hardware requirement, these servers can deliver.

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
7
Pre-configured templates
6
Pre-defined machine images
6
Operating system support
5
Security controls
6

Comments

More Reviews of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers