Reliable with simple APIs
Updated February 06, 2024

Reliable with simple APIs

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

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC

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

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

Cons

  • 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).
We didn't use reserved capacity as our main focus was allocating instances on the fly. While reserved instances can be low cost, transient instances have even lower costs and that is what we are using to expand the capacity of our data center on-demand while keeping the cost as low as possible.
We did not use dedicated instances.
The services are reliable and reasonably priced. IBM products are used to augment our data center capabilities and meet all researchers' needs.
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
IBM APIs are easier to use to create, configure, and destroy VSIs.

Do you think IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC again?

Yes

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

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
6.6
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

IBM Cloud Support and Implementation

It was very straight forward and the implementation went smoothly.
Advanced - It was part of the subscription package we received when our organization signed up for IBM Cloud access.
There was once instance when all traffic to one virtual server was blocked. The firewall configuration was not well set and the support team troubleshooted the problem with us and walked us through the steps to fix the issue.
  • Central Documentation and Learning Hub
  • IBM Cloud Docs
  • IBM Cloud product demos and tutorial videos
The documentation and Cloud Docs along with the demos and tutorials have helped a lot to get familiar with their new services and troubleshooting some of the issues we faced setting up the environment.
They are knowledgeable, highly technical and have always resolved the issues I contacted them about. The only con is that they can take a bit long (couple of hours) to respond. I live chat option would be great.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers Pricing, Time savings and Efficiency

We use the transient instances to expand our data center on-demand and that cut in the average cost definitely helped us reduce our running costs and increase our capacity in terms of running more instances.
I don’t know how much time was saved, but I know time was definitely saved
Since we run transient instances on demand, the hourly rate is very beneficial to us as the instances get created and destroyed based on the available jobs. Thus, a monthly rate does not work for our model and only an hourly rate such as the one provided can work for our use case.

Using IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC

5 - Project management, technical leads, senior analytics developers.
4 - Computer science background with specializations in data analytics, cloud computing, networks, and data security.
  • Fast on-demand deployment
  • Test deployments
  • Environment testing
  • CI/CD runners
  • Sample web applications
  • Development sandbox
It has a flexible and affordable pricing, easy to configure and manage. It is easy to spawn one or multiple instances and have them up and running in no time.

Comments

  • Prem D'Cruz | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Prem D'Cruz
    (Vendor Representative) commented 4 years ago
    Thank you so much for taking the time to review. If am the Offering Manager and if there is anything I can do to help please do not hesitate to reach out

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