Item: IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers are being used as a pilot project to extend our data center used by researchers. In other words, extra jobs that cannot be fulfilled by our data center will be offloaded to IBM VSI. Currently it is being used by one department but it will be used by the entire university once the solution is stable and goes into production.

Pros and Cons

Fast to spawn
Easy to configure using SoftLayer APIs
Many flavors available
Relatively cheap, especially for the transient instances

The IBM Cloud Web UI is very slow and not responsive
It would be nice to provide a direct way to choose a template image when creating a VSI
It would be nice if transient VSIs can be resized (CPU and Mem)

Return on Investment

It will reduce the time researchers have to wait to be assigned computing respources
It will reduce the current operational costs
It provides "infinite" increase of our data center

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Transient Pricing

We are only using transient VSI to reduce the cost. While IBM can reclaim the instance at any time, this almost never happens to us. A transient VSI would run for couple of weeks with no problems. It is also way cheaper compared to the on-demand instances. The only issue with IBM transient VSIs is that they are not resizable (CPU, Mem).

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

IBM APIs are easier to use to create, configure, and destroy VSIs.

IBM Cloud Portfolio

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

The services are reliable and reasonably priced. IBM products are used to augment our data center capabilities and meet all researchers' needs.

Other Software Used

Kubernetes, IBM Watson Assistant, IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding

Likelihood to Recommend

The API for creating and destroying IBM VSIs is very simple compared to AWS APIs, for example. It required less configuration and it is easy to get the VSI to communicate with one another. IBM VSIs are well suited for situations where you need to control them programmatically using the SoftLayer APIs and create a cluster of nodes that communicate together with minimum configuration.

Reliable with simple APIs

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers