Item: IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
Rating: 9
Author: John Reeve

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Bare Metal servers for the database and search indexing layers of our software stack because it gives us dedicated memory and disks. We can fully control the configuration and fine-tune it as needed, which results in much faster response times for our web application. Our main reason for using Bare Metal is the speed and security it provides over a cloud-based distributed database.

Pros and Cons

Dedicated memory and disk.
Easy to deploy.
Configure the hardware according to your specs.

BIOS/Firmware upgrades can take longer than expected.
Rebooting could be faster.

Return on Investment

Utilization on the SSD drives rarely goes above 5%.
Storage latency is nil because there is no network layer to traverse.
We've been able to provide a very fast web app because of these servers.

IBM Bare Metal Servers High Performance

Our database reads and writes, along with search indexing, are the most compute-intensive workloads in our stack. However, having SSDs and a significant amount of memory has reduced these tasks and our application response times to record lows. In fact, we could throw even more at these servers as they are currently underutilized.

IBM Bare Metal Servers Provisioning

I was surprised by how fast these servers can be provisioned. It's definitely a benefit and a good reason to use them. Historically, we would expect a bare metal server to take a few days to be provisioned.

IBM Cloud Portfolio

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
IBM Cloud Object Storage

The Bare Metal servers provide just one layer of our stack. On our private subnet, we have a complement of virtual servers, file storage, block storage, object storage, load balancers, and so on. IBM Cloud provides us with all of the pieces we need to deploy a full software stack.

Key Insights

Do you think IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers again?

Yes

Other Software Used

PostgreSQL, Python IDLE

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need full control over a server's configuration and security, Bare Metal is the way to go. It not only gives you full control but also provides speed improvements over virtual servers. For example, if you don't want to rely on network-attached storage, which is your only option with a virtual server, the Bare Metal server will give you local SSD storage that has almost zero latency.

Fast and powerful servers that you can configure and build to your specs

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers