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
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Data intensive applications run very well. These machines a "built" for this kind of load. Word of advice, don't skimp on the network cards, nor the dual-bonding, in the event of streaming, as the 1GB tends to be not enough to handle what the rest of a high-performant box can load.
This is a typical average. My only comment is sometimes on larger orders, it is wiser to "source" the hardware, in order to properly stage the servers. Basically, if you are ordering a bunch of the same kind of server in the same data center, it is wiser to give a heads up for asset allocation and parts management.
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.
This is usually a good thing, but I have had a mixed bag. The public cloud does not always mesh well with the private cloud and there is a decent amount of configuration required before both can interconnect. As it usually follows, added complexity has caused us issues with traceability and outages.