As organizations work to reduce spending within enterprise cloud environments, they often face the challenge of one-size-fits all payment options through their cloud providers. As roadmaps and priorities shift against the backdrop of reduced capital and tightened ROIs, organizations aim to minimize spending risk throughout the year and create more predictable budgeting environments. When it comes to designing your cloud computing operations, advanced planning pays off with IBM Cloud Reservations on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC.

What are IBM Cloud Reservations?

Consider this: Your favorite out-of-town friends come to visit your city for the weekend, and you want to treat them to dinner at a popular restaurant. You don’t want to wait two hours for a table, so you naturally decide to make a reservation ahead of time. In addition to eliminating wait time, the reservation provides a great table location, enough seating for your party and a stress-free dining experience.

IBM Cloud Reservations on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC are much like the scenario above. You can reserve virtual servers in a specific IBM Cloud Availability Zone and IBM Cloud Data Center. Your reserved capacity is not only guaranteed, it also delivers up to 60% savings compared with on-demand IBM Cloud billing cycles. You can claim that capacity whenever you need it for critical production times.

Unlike standard monthly IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC, with IBM Cloud Reservations you choose from a one-year or three-year term. Either term is billed monthly with no upfront payment necessary. The vCPU, RAM, instance storage and GPUs are included in your reservation for the duration of your term. Additional components, including network bandwidth, additional storage services, OS and third-party software, are charged. By reserving your virtual server in advance, you’re saving both time and money.

Key features include the following:

• Locked-in cost-efficiency through your one-year or three-year term with discounts up to 60% off standard on-demand pricing.
• Improved budgeting and forecasting with consistent monthly payments.
• Guaranteed capacity and availability of your virtual server in your IBM Cloud VPC when and where you need it for the duration of your term.
• Flexibility in provisioning by converting any existing on-demand virtual server to IBM Cloud Reservation billing and attaching or detaching any compatible virtual server to your reservation.
• Fast deployment in minutes through IBM Cloud’s developer-friendly catalog, UI, API or CLI.

Who should use IBM Cloud Reservations?

IBM Cloud Reservations on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC are ideal for organizations with sustained workloads, especially those who seek to resolve cloud capacity and availability issues. They’re also valuable for new-to-cloud companies dealing with one-to-three-year internal procurement cycles who could use instant savings without the large up-front payment.

Getting started

IBM Cloud Reservations on IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC are available on all 7 family profiles, including compute, balanced, memory, very high memory, ultra-high memory, storage optimized, and GPU — in all IBM Cloud Multizone Regions.

Visit our IBM Cloud documentation pages to view all available profile configurations. Alternatively, head straight into our IBM Cloud Catalog provisioning page to compare and contrast discounts for your preferred reservation.

Get USD 1,000 in IBM Cloud credits: If you’re curious about deploying your first workload on IBM Cloud VPC, or you’re an existing customer looking to provision new instances, then be sure to use our limited time promotion for IBM Cloud VPC. Get USD 1,000 in credits to use toward any of your new VPC resources—including all compute, network and storage components with promo code VPC1000 upon checkout.