You want strong compute resources to accelerate cloud native application development and AI in your own secure space on the public cloud. You’ve come to the right place.

The breadth and depth of choices for virtual servers on IBM Cloud infrastructure has grown quite a bit over the past year. In June, we announced the release of IBM Cloud VPC Infrastructure—a brand-new experience to manage virtual machine-based compute, storage, and networking resources in a private, secure space you define. The quick global expansion of VPC in the Dallas, Frankfurt, Tokyo, London, and Sydney regions reflected our commitment to delivering more secure, agile, and responsive resources for your modern workloads.

We’re happy to report that we’re not slowing down anytime soon. Now, we’re delivering the next big step: (Gen 2) IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC—complete with unmatched network performance and best-in-class instances that you can provision, on average, in less than one minute.

Burst into the cloud with up to 80Gbps network performance and 5x faster provisioning

IBM Cloud clients that need to quickly modernize their virtual compute resources can do so with extremely fast provisioning and network speeds in the latest release of our developer-friendly VPC infrastructure.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC (Gen 2) now deliver network performance up to 80Gbps, which means our clients can push far more data in far less time. It’s more bandwidth for applications on a superior public platform. And, with this latest release of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers on VPC, virtual server instances provision 5x faster (less than one minute on average).

Foundational profiles to drive your heavy compute solutions—faster and easier

IBM Cloud VPC infrastructure has profiles that fit for all workloads, including cloud native application development, customer-facing websites, hybrid cloud environments, and workload extensions to the cloud—with performance you can depend on (resources are not oversubscribed).    

These are the options:

• Balanced: Ideal for common cloud workloads that need a balance of performance and scale. The balanced profiles (with network-attached storage) provide higher performance since resources are not oversubscribed.
• Compute optimized: Ideal for more vCPU-intensive workloads, like high web traffic workloads, production batch processing, and frontend web servers.
• Memory optimized: Ideal for memory-intensive workloads, like in-memory analytics and real-time analytics workloads and intensive database applications.

Enterprise grade support and BYO-everything

Today’s release of Gen 2 IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC still has the advantages of Gen 1 IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC, including bringing your own subnet/IPs to easily extend your presence in the public cloud and bringing your own keys to encrypt block volumes. It’s a simpler way for our clients to connect to their networks and improve security.

Importing custom images is now supported as well, along with platform integrated users and permissions that fully integrate into Identity and Access Management and the entire IBM Cloud platform.

POWER what’s next for IBM Cloud VPC—2.85x faster AI throughput

The same IBM Power System hardware running the world’s fastest and smartest supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, will soon be available this fall on the IBM Cloud VPC platform.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on POWER—specifically designed for Linux users—will deliver 2.85x faster throughput (compared to bare metal x86 infrastructure) for AI, deep learning, and visual analytics workloads. It’s the ideal virtual compute environment for AI-hungry Linux users in the cloud. IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on POWER will have non-accelerated and GPU-accelerated options.

With the introduction of POWER9 Virtual Servers on IBM Cloud VPC infrastructure, IBM Cloud is uniquely positioned to help clients move forward with their modernization and AI objectives. Many clients have already adopted POWER9 as their AI platform, and this offering will allow users to try out new AI workloads on POWER9 in a logically isolated, public cloud environment.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on POWER will feature blazing-fast GPUs fueled by NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and NVLink 2.0 for shared CPU to GPU memory to drive fast deep learning iterations for popular AI frameworks such as Caffe and Chainer.

Exceptional GPU performance won’t be the only advantage of IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on POWER. With PCIe Gen4, they boast faster I/O bandwidth vs. PCIe Gen3, 30% more memory bandwidth, and 2x the number of threads compared to typical x86 vCPUs. 

Getting started with IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC

Today’s newly announced profiles and features for IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC (Gen 2) are currently available for provisioning in the Dallas MZR region, expanding worldwide over the next coming months.

IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC (Gen 1) are currently available through the IBM Cloud Catalog across Dallas, Frankfurt, Tokyo, London, and Sydney IBM Cloud MZRs.

Want to try IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on POWER? The good news is, these systems will be available in our North American IBM Cloud data centers in early 2020. In the meantime, we’re running a Limited Availability Beta program where qualified candidates can get early access to the systems, get in-depth technical assistance as needed, and provide their valuable feedback. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, visit our on-boarding page, and a member of our team will be in touch with you.