Item: IBM Cloud Bare Metal Server - VPC
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as an experimental environment and to give us accessible computer resources without endangering our internal infrastructure. The VPC allows us to leverage several newer technologies without the typical hurdles of approvals from various IT departments. Specifically, our data science work is developed on virtual cloud. Again, this allows for free use of the toolsets in the data science platforms for easy and fast implementations for our business use cases.

Pros and Cons

Integrations with open-source software
Reduced administrative burden
Easy to implement and deploy

Prepackaged deployments for common use cases, with embedded software and archectitures
Cost estimation can be difficult to understand
Expensive

Return on Investment

Capitalized on use cases faster
Better analytics capabilities
Met strict deadlines for business area

Implementation Rating

The implementation of the VPCs was seemless. All the components worked according to their function. This was also done quickly, and without needing a lot of administrative support. By gaining support from IBM as well, this gave us the expert administrative support we needed and did not have to burden our own departments.

IBM Cloud Portfolio

IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Watson Studio (formerly IBM Data Science Experience)
IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding
IBM Watson Tone Analyzer
IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier
IBM Watson Knowledge Studio
IBM Watson OpenScale

These services connect very well together inside the IBM platform. This ease of integration saves time and helps optimize movement of data across these components. For the most part, it's all open source anyway, and so the "flavor" of the infrastructure is agnostic to me. However, I believe I gain data speed and availability by building components together inside a single entity. Depending on your data usage, this might be a critical need.

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud AI, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, SAS Advanced Analytics and DataRobot

We vetted various competitors of IBM to gain better insight into our purchases. Again, this for most part depends on your organization, but IBM's advanced analytics platform is on par with most of the bigger platforms. They have developments that ease the speed of development and helped us gain ROI sooner than expected.

Likelihood to Recommend

We used it to deploy a version of our data science environment, particularly in tight integrations. Some software needs both administrative and technical support to handle it, and with the VPC sitting outside our company's infrastructure, we could readily build without burden. This allowed us to grab ROI faster and within the deadlines required by the business areas.

A good option for deploying cloud services

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)