Flex harder, better, faster, stronger

A few months ago, we reimagined data warehousing in the IBM Cloud with Flex Performance, the flagship tier of our new Flex line of offerings. Flex brings new levels of elasticity, speed, and resiliency to data warehousing on the IBM Cloud, and forms the foundation for our strategy moving forward. We’re working continuously to not only strengthen and enhance its capabilities, but to also make them more accessible to you so you can better leverage them and get the most out of your data warehouse. Today, we’re proud to announce a significant update to our Flex family.

Frankfurt availability

Your data should reside close to the teams that need it. For customers who want their data to reside in Europe, Flex is now immediately available in IBM Cloud’s Frankfurt datacenter. Regardless of deployment location, you’ll get the same powerful features Flex provides, on top of the fully-managed service we bring to IBM customers worldwide.

More bang, same buck

If you want the best analytics performance, you’re going to need the fastest processors. We don’t shy away from our underlying hardware with obscure, nondescript compute units, because we want you to know you’re getting top-of-the-line hardware with our service – you know, the stuff that really screams. A whole generation ahead of what some of our competitors offer. That’s right – all new Flex instances will be automatically deployed on hardware running Intel Skylake processors. Flex instances built on hardware running these processors perform more than 20% faster than previous machines that ran on Broadwell processors, and you’ll get this performance boost for no extra cost.

Scriptable savings with programmatic scaling

Flex opens up the possibility of immense cost savings by allowing you to control your resource consumption. Our engineering team has built out a gorgeous Flex App to help you scale your Flex instance easily, and calculate the price difference when scaling so you don’t have to math it out yourself. They’ve also created a REST API so you can scale your Flex instance from the command line – here’s a sample API request to scale a Flex Performance instance to 72 compute cores:

curl --request POST \
--url https://db2woc.mybluemix.net/v1/scale \
--H 'accept: text/plain' \
--H 'content-type: application/json' \
--d '{"instanceid":"your-flex-performance-instance-id", "spaceid":"your-space-id", "cpucores":72}'

You could even take it a step further by writing scripts to scale your instance regularly and achieve greater cost efficiency. It’s that simple. Use the Flex App or REST API to scale as often as you want; there’s no limit to the amount of scaling operations you can perform.

We combine world-class database technology, developed by IBM Research, together with the latest hardware, to bring you a feature-rich, enterprise-grade, elastic cloud data warehouse. We’ve only just started our journey with Flex, and we’re excited to continue developing it so you can take your analytics to the next level. Check it out here.