Bare Metal Cloud Environment: What is it and What does it do?

By Darshik Jariwala - January, 7th 2014

Cloud computing is booming, quite ridiculously to say the least. Gartner predicts 2016 will be a “defining year” for cloud and that it will probably reach a new level. CIO’s from different organizations who have deployed it, will probably have different opinions based their own different experiences. Although each have a different priority set for moving to cloud, their objectives do remain the same nonetheless; efficient, straightforward and a sustainable delivery model which serves the one most important purpose. A Productive and Profitable IT service delivery model. And to achieve that, it is imperative the performance (in terms of speed) remains just as consistent with all the resource hungry applications. However, it is no secret that some are not too impressed when it comes to speed and consistency in cloud. Could Bare Metal Cloud be a solution to it? But what is this Bare Metal cloud and what does it do? How is it used? What can it possibly do to provide the much required performance boost in cloud services?

Bare Metal Cloud explained

To put it simply, Bare Metal cloud eliminates the need of a hypervisor. Without the hypervisor, it runs directly over the hardware using all the physical hardware resources at its disposal. When the cloud application runs on a virtual machine, you know the resources are shared with others, forming a multi-tenant environment. Bare metal, on the other hand, gives you the ultimate processing speed, storage space and the network I/O all dedicated to you. It goes without saying, the computing speed, performance and environment bare metal cloud offers is obviously far superior to the other virtualized environments.

Owing to the absence of any virtualized software which provides a shared hosting environment and allocates and scales resources for the multiple client’s on demand, many a times it also results in an inconsistent performance. Having a server completely to dedicated you, bare metal cloud guarantees the performance and speed you originally signed up for, with computing speed at your disposal. Resource demanding applications won’t overload the server, unlike other virtualized environments.

Bare Metal Cloud Providers

More and more providers are joining this list which at present consists of BareMetalCloud.com (previously known as NewServers), Storm (by LiquidWeb Inc.), Softlayer (an IBM company), Rackspace , Bigstep and Internap. All of which can provide you a dedicated server with no hypervisor for more control, flexibility to customize the server, network and storage, increased reliability due to built-in redundancy and of course a dedicated support team in hour of need.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, for any company it all eventually boils down to their need and requirement. Performance and security remain at the top of the priority list of any company, which the bare metal cloud can efficiently provide. However, Virtualized environment as well as bare metal cloud can provide the desired security measures, which would make quite a debatable topic really. Since performance and native cloud hosting environment are one of the key reasons why any company would consider going for bare metal. It is certainly one the advantages which may be turn out to be the deciding factor for many.

Photo Credit – Robert & Pam/Flickr