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If you have a need for high IOPS, the IBM cloud is probably your most cost-effective option
November 13, 2019

If you have a need for high IOPS, the IBM cloud is probably your most cost-effective option

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

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers

All of our servers are on the cloud, and that is IBM's cloud. As of today, we have 102 virtual servers, along with the associated required storage. In our case, storage is our largest cloud investment since our business is to host a data-crunching application to help our clients and utilities, make sense and act upon their customers' incoming smart meter data.
  • Storage that provides high IOPS at a cost-effective rate. We evaluated other offerings this summer, in particular, AWS and Microsoft, and their high-IOPS disks were more expensive than IBM's.
  • Automated deployment of new virtual servers and their storage is simplified by an API which we leverage using Ansible.
  • In our tier, support is timely.
  • Billing is complicated and unclear. It can be difficult to determine exactly how much each instance costs, and grouping them is also difficult (we need to charge different machines to different internal departments, and while we have resorted to using labels in the server names, we are not able to do that with storage).
  • Their firewall options are not user-friendly nor very cost-effective. We use their Vyatta offering and, though it is an operating system rooted in free software, it is expensive. It is difficult to manage as well as its mgmt is done exclusively via a hard-to-learn text-only hierarchical configuration.
  • Positive: High IOPS storage is quite cost effective.
The complexity of our application has prevented us from being able to split it off into bite-sized applets that could perform data crunching on servers without a guaranteed uptime. This is unlikely to change in the near future.
This is probably something we would be interested in if we were able to better understand its potential benefits and pitfalls.
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon's high IOPS storage devices are more expensive than the ones on the IBM cloud, per singular IOPS (input/output operation per second) so it makes much more sense for us to stick with IBM even if the other services that amazon offers are somewhat less costly, all things considered.
Well suited: Environments with a high volume of storage-intensive processes which require high IOPS disks. Less appropriate: If bare metal servers are required, they can be expensive. Also, operations that require constant networking changes might find easier ways to do it.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Feature Ratings

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
5.6
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
9
Dynamic scaling
Not Rated
Elastic load balancing
Not Rated
Pre-configured templates
Not Rated
Monitoring tools
3
Pre-defined machine images
6
Operating system support
8
Security controls
2

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Support

It is adequate, but you need to be ready to argue your point - which is fair enough, I suppose, but being given the opposite of the benefit of the doubt every time does not necessarily result in an enjoyable user experience.
ProsCons
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Yes
Yes - Unfortunately, it wasn't. The bug resulted in our losing data, and it took much, much back and forth just to get their support team to admit the issue was caused by their side. In the end, our data was irretrievably lost, our project was delayed as a result, and the bug is still present. Only now, we know how to work around it and avoid it.
Sorry but, no. Their support is adequate at best.