The industry’s newest SmartNIC has landed on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC, and with it are hardware and firmware upgrades for improved networking, storage and security across general-purpose, high-performance and VMware workloads. Customers can now get improved, instance-like performance and connectivity to more IBM Cloud services—free of charge. [1]

What’s new?

The latest SmartNIC update on bare metal servers seamlessly integrates into a customer’s entire IBM Cloud VPC ecosystem, supporting the same networking, storage and PaaS services as IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC. Provisioning your bare metal server will be fully complementary to provisioning your virtual servers for easier automation and usability. A few of our most significant updates with this release include support for the following:

• IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC: New IOPs levels are now available, and all file shares are backed by solid-state drives. Use file storage in addition to—or as an alternative to—local NVMe for a scalable, cost-effective solution.
• Support up to 228 vNICs per server: Concurrency delivers improved performance for handling several connections and tasks in parallel. It also allows IBM Cloud to manage the most complex networks.
• Client VPE (Virtual Private Endpoints): Get private connectivity to IBM Cloud services within the VPC network of your choosing for enhanced security.

In addition to the above net-new features, key existing networking features will continue to be supported, including VPC NIC and VLAN interfaces, Custom Routes, Multi-FIPs support and VIP Failover.

How does this shape the future of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC?

Although this is a landmark service-wide update, the evolution of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC doesn’t end here. In adoption phases throughout the remainder of 2023 and into 1H 2024, you’ll see additional upgrades to load balancing and flow logs. We’re also excited to expand our 4^th Gen Intel^® Xeon^® Scalable processors (codenamed Sapphire Rapids) footprint in combination with Elba in 2024.

Just a few months ago, we announced its first availability on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers classic, and just this week, we opened registration for our Beta program on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC. Today’s development brings us closer to having Intel’s newest microarchitecture on all IBM Cloud compute services with the onset of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC.

Start with USD 1,000 in savings

Do you have an IBM Cloud account? Whether you’re a new or existing customer, all you’ll need is an IBM Cloud account to provision new bare metal and instantly get USD 1,000 in free IBM Cloud credits. Apply code VPC1000 to save on all IBM Cloud VPC resources, including compute, storage and networking. [2]

Learn more

If you’re new to IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers or IBM Cloud VPC in general, we invite you to explore our product and solution pages. You can also discover getting started guides, tutorials, provisioning how-to’s and detailed specifications for today’s announcement inside our cloud docs.

[1] New features are only available on new server provisions. No in-place upgrades are available for existing deployments.

[2] Promo offer valid for new and existing customers while supplies last. Offer cannot be combined with any other promos or offers. Valid on new orders only and cannot be applied to existing customer discounts.