Reliable with simple APIs
March 22, 2021

Reliable with simple APIs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers

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.
  • 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)
  • 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
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).
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
IBM APIs are easier to use to create, configure, and destroy VSIs.
The services are reliable and reasonably priced. IBM products are used to augment our data center capabilities and meet all researchers' needs.
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.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
10
Dynamic scaling
6
Elastic load balancing
Not Rated
Pre-configured templates
6
Monitoring tools
6
Pre-defined machine images
2
Operating system support
10
Security controls
6