With IBM Cloud (formerly called SoftLayer), IBM is attempting to redefine what cloud actually means. The company offers more than just Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as part of its wide portfolio of services within IBM Cloud (whose final cost can be determined by contacting the company). These services include a combination of typical public cloud services with in-house and IBM-branded services. For example, if you want to simply set up a bare-metal server as you would with a traditional hosting company, you can do that within IBM Cloud. You can also provision strictly virtual infrastructure and cloud service-style applications, or you can add developer services and even access the IBM Watson supercomputer and the Watson Assistant. Despite these options and the excellent rating it earns, it doesn't beat competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS) in our IaaS solutions review roundup.
IBM Cloud delivers data center and cloud services plus a lot more. The complexity of some of the solutions is such that you're probably going to need IBM's services to take advantage of the most advanced applications. While IBM's services will probably be a necessity for some things, the fact that the services are available at all is a huge plus. There are options you have with IBM Cloud that simply aren't available anywhere else.
The integration of the IBM Cloud Catalog with its vast array of options means that IBM Cloud can provide extremely granular options on virtual hardware—processors, memory, type of storage, type of networking—rather than just offering small, medium, or large virtual machine (VM) sizes. You can combine bare-metal servers into your own cloud. While the equipment isn't on your site, you do have near-absolute control over it because you're renting those complete servers from IBM. Those servers are configured exactly as you wish them to be, and the software and operating systems on them are what you put there.
IBM Cloud lets you use the company's Infrastructure Management System (IMS) to control it. However your primary interface will be the IBM Cloud Catalog for most activities. Provisioning and de-provisioning, logging, billing, and alerts are all done via the Cloud Catalog. IBM Cloud also includes an IMS application programming interface (API) that exposes the cloud's every capability using Representational State Transfer (REST). In short, if your IT staff includes decent programmers, then it's relatively easy to integrate the IMS into your existing, web-based infrastructure management tools.
IBM Cloud has dramatically extended its choices of software that can reside on both their virtual and bare-metal servers. IBM provides 30 different choices of software, including CentOS, CloudLinux, Debian, Microsoft (including Windows Server 2016), RedHat, and Ubuntu. Bare metal servers can also add Brocade, Citrix, and VMware hypervisors. Besides the usual assortment of Linux distributions and Windows Server 2008, 2012, and 2016, IBM Cloud also offers users the FreeBSD OS.
Application Setup
All that flexibility and granularity could add complexity during setup and, while there is a long list of software and services you can add to your cloud, doing so via the IBM Cloud Catalog is primarily a matter of selecting what you want. Once selected, they're added. IN that sense, it's similiar to more straightforward services, such as DigitalOcean ($1.00 at Digital Ocean) and Rackspace ($10,300.00 at Rackspace) . However, once you're done selecting your servers, you'll probably need the help of IBM Cloud engineers to fully configure your infrastructure and cleanly integrate some services, though users with solid IT experience can do much of the work themselves. That may sound like an extra step, but IBM specializes in highly advanced and customized data centers, so you'll likely be able to do things with this service that would be far more complex with a DIY competitor.
IBM Cloud provided solid performance on par with the other cloud services tested. Geekbench 4 by Primate Labs is a cross-platform benchmarking app that's designed to treat all platforms the same, regardless of the operating system. I used Geekbench 4 to run a variety of integer, floating point, and memory checks. With this benchmark, higher numbers are better. I did not test network or storage throughput, but with IBM using 40 gigabit per second (Gbps) networking, throughput should not be a problem.
I ran the benchmark on a VM with a single virtual processor (vCPU) and 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM, while operating Microsoft Windows Server 2016. IBM's benchmark numbers were 2,328 for the single core score, and 2,078 for the multi-core score. Both numbers are lower than what we found with AWS.
IBM Cloud now has 60 data centers around the world. That means you can use IBM Cloud anywhere in the world you may have an office. If you don't like surprises (and, when it comes to infrastructure and app performance, most IT pros don't), you will like IBM Cloud.
Similar Products
Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud Platform
Microsoft Azure
Rackspace Managed Cloud
Pricing and Contract
IBM has a variety of contracts and service-level agreements (SLAs), and you don't have to have a contract to use IBM Cloud. You can buy IBM Cloud services on a pay-as-you-go basis just as you can with AWS. IBM offers a 100 percent uptime guarantee, which is a feature from the days of IBM's timeshare offerings back in the 1980s. Unlike some providers, IBM has the ability to deliver that kind of service (or close to it). Typically, you'd buy IBM Cloud in terms of virtual servers on a monthly basis. Prices are reasonable.
To get an idea on price, we turned to IBM's pricing calculator, and when that result wasn't clear, we asked IBM for help pricing out our standard infrastructure suite. This suite comprised four on-demand extra small instances: the base web server, the load balancer, and two peak web servers. The web server disaster recovery (DR) server were hosted on a pair of small instances.
Database backup used 300GB of Object Storage, and the hosting site consumed 4 GB of Object Storage. IBM Cloud has ready-to-run MySQL instances, including Compose for MySQL and IBM Cloud SQL Query. The total monthly data transfer allowance, source to destination, was 140 GB—with a destination-to-source allowance of 800 GB.
We used IBM's standard no-extra-cost support system. This help desk provides assistance via e-mail, tickets, and phone calls, and it guarantees a 20-minute response time. In total, this simple eight-server web app package would cost approximately $5,411.16 per year.
IBM Cloud's performance was in the middle of the pack, but so is its price. If you're a fan of IBM services, then IBM Cloud will give you exactly what you expect. But even if you're new to IBM, this is a good place to consider IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud's high-speed intranet connections could be just what your complex apps need from an IaaS solution, but you'll need to pay extra to make it work.
IBM Cloud is a big cloud offering of which IaaS is only a part. Part of the package includes things you can't get anywhere else, such as IBM Watson, and the level of service IBM pioneered with its timeshare and outsourcing.
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