IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers vs. Microsoft Azure

IBM Cloud Bare Metal servers are best suited if you are looking for an alternative for adding computing resources to your organization's IT domain. The costs of owning and maintaining a physical resource in the organization are far more than renting computing resources on the cloud. The bare-metal servers allow you to utilize the entire server for your organization's requirements.

Actually, migrating to Microsoft Azure is a good solution for almost any situation, especially when all components of your network are ready to become cloud-based. The only drawback I personally encounter frequently is that older software packages cannot always be easily picked up and moved to Microsoft Azure in an optimal manner.

Incentivized

• Performance - the servers perform really well, even under stress. We have some long build processes running concurrently, and the server [can] serve other applications without any problems.
• Secure - for the most part, the servers are very secure and IBM provides many tools to help [make] sure the servers stay that way.
• Highly Available - while we have experienced various downtimes and outages with other IBM Cloud offerings, so far, we have not experienced any with [IBM Cloud] Bare Metal Servers.

Incentivized

• Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
• Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
• BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
• Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.

Incentivized

• Firmware upgrades are not always easy to perform and can be required at unusual time intervals at different datacenters.
• No networking monitoring is available.
• Changes on the IBM side can cause an outage, so you MUST plan for redundancy when building out.

Incentivized

• In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
• Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
• Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.

Incentivized

Due to cloud computing taking over the market, I have moved to cloud computing. It is so much easier upgrading or downsizing a virtual server on the cloud vs bare metal. I find it way more convenient on cloud computing. The provisioning takes way too long for bare metal servers.

Incentivized

We have been very satisfied with Windows Azure and now a lot of our business depends on it as more teams are now deploying their applications into Azure. Our next step is to have our Infrastructure team move their resources to Azure. It will take awhile for that to happen but we are positive that it will.

Incentivized

Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

Great responsiveness and detailed know-how from the team. Self Explanatory and good resources on the Web to resolve issues. Good communication on issues via email. Good response times on issues which arise and where we have received support from the IBM support team. We believe that IBM is a great Partner to base our IT applications and we believe that a critical infrastructure like a cloud backend will be well served if we continue to base it on IBM.

Incentivized

Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.

Incentivized

The implementation of this software took place as we planned. The performance time taken for full functionality was very reliable with positive results. The customer support team was the best team I have ever met in my career experience. They are always with timely responses when reached to offer any help.

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

Configured file systems on bare metal servers and was able to increase the size whenever required. Can limit the costs initially to understand the application demand and need. Later, have the flexibility to increase the size of the file system as the application grows bigger and bigger without any hassle.

Incentivized

I feel that Microsoft Azure typically outperforms Google Cloud Platform in hybrid cloud capabilities, integration aspects, and, primarily, security compliance features. Azure offered superior integration with Microsoft's enterprise software ecosystem, and it's second to none in my opinion. This made it the natural choice for most, especially if heavily invested in Windows, Office 365, or Active Directory deployments. We chose Azure over GCP because we simply needed Windows workload support as a strong driver, more access to global regions, and let's not forget that most tech teams in an organization are Microsoft Certified, which makes skillset transfer from on-prem to cloud a minimal learning curve over shifting to a different provider.

• [I feel] IBM caused significant damages to their acknowledged "gross negligence." [...] [In my opinion,] holding customers/data hostage to limit gross negligence is an extremely poor practice.
• [With my experiences,] our investment was a tremendous loss in time & resources. Their lack of support, [in my opinion,] has caused us to pivot our entire business model and revenue stream. Our product re-launch has been setback by ~18 months due to damages caused by [in my experience, to be] IBM's gross negligence.

• Times and growth went into it. By balancing on-premises maintenance with continuous cloud improvements, we’ve budgeted and planned endlessly increased capacity.
• In today’s world of cyber-crime, clients can put even more faith in what they’ve heard. We built an innovative single-sign-on hub for all users. Also, other business platforms use Azure application gateways, reducing worker switching time and increasing productivity.
• Its step can automate to improve the investment. In addition, we can integrate our organization’s credentials into an authorization for other systems.