Item: IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
Rating: 7
Author: John Reeve

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cloud recently acquired SoftLayer, and so we became an IBM customer. We are using their virtual servers primarily for web servers and job queues.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Servers are deployed quickly after ordering them
They do a good job notifying us of pending maintenance
Servers are fast and reliable
The private network across their data centers is great

Cons

They are aggressively decommissioning services and data centers and forcing us to migrate relatively new servers to other data centers
They could respond more quickly to tickets/cases

Return on Investment

Historically positive, as they've been more hands on which requires less of our time.
Recently negative, as they've been more hands off and forcing us to migrate products to IBM equivalents.

IBM is still far better than Rackspace. The support at Rackspace has gone downhill and I'm surprised they still toss around the word "fanatical" like it's a given. It's not. Anyways, the IBM acquisition of SoftLayer has had a lot of negatives, but overall their support team is trying and you can tell they are probably experiencing similar frustration with the move.

Other Software Used

Apache Solr, PostgreSQL, CentOS

Likelihood to Recommend

They are very well suited for web application environments and job queues, which is what we are using them for. If you need more sys admin assistance they are not a good fit because they expect you to do most of the server configuration. Their support can be very hands-off at times and has become even more so with the transition from SoftLayer to IBM.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great virtual servers from a company experiencing growing pains