A startup's take on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
February 18, 2019

A startup's take on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers

Scott Galvin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers

The use of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers was organization-wide; for development, testing, and production. We also ran multiple types of workloads, such as website hosting, email, our internal wiki, backups, and DNS. The problem it solved was the speed at which we could deploy additional servers, compared to filing a request with an IT department.
  • SSL Certificate issuance is virtually seamless.
  • The 4 distributions of Linux offered were great for the individual needs of groups within our company; for example if a particular product required Red Hat, it wasn't a problem that we had everything else running on Debian.
  • Fine grained controls such as the ability to select the speed of the Ethernet interface are exclusive to the IBM Cloud offering.
  • Ability to quickly clone an existing VM instance.
  • Many services, such as Cloud Internet Services, are marked up resold services from another provider, in this case, CloudFlare.
  • The number of services available through the Catalog can become overwhelming.
  • Decreased time to market
  • Improved ability to scale applications horizontally.
  • Decreased IT costs.
Amazon AWS is wildly complex right out of the gate, so it was easier to get started with IBM. We've also enjoyed the large global footprint IBM has and the dozens of geographic choices for server locations. It's also been easier to obtain a large number of IP addresses; we didn't have to jump through as many hoops as what other providers have put us through.
If you're already a customer of IBM, or using an IBM product through an ASP or reseller, or you need access to the hundreds of services IBM provides, it's a great place to build out your infrastructure.

If you're an established company slowly adding VMs, a smaller provider in the vast digital ocean of choices may be better.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
9
Dynamic scaling
7
Elastic load balancing
8
Pre-configured templates
8
Monitoring tools
8
Pre-defined machine images
8
Operating system support
9
Security controls
9