In order to cut IT costs while also realising greater flexibility, scalability, and efficiency, several organisations are moving over to cloud infrastructure services. But with virtualisation and automation come a number of problems too, which businesses are starting to discover since switching to this recent tech innovation.
Should Businesses Be Investing More Into The Bare Metal Environment?
One issue is performance degradation caused by multi-tenanted public cloud platforms. On top of that, the introduction of a hypervisor layer means additional processing that can hinder availability and speed.
Thankfully, there is a solution that promises to provide all the benefits of cloud infrastructure services with little to no negative side effects. Therefore, is it time your business invests more in bare metal servers?
The bare metal environment
With the bare metal cloud, a dedicated server can complement virtualised services and eliminate the overhead of virtualisation but still reap the rewards such as greater flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.
One of the reasons why is because bare metal servers do not run a hypervisor, are not virtualised, yet can be delivered via a cloud-like service model. As a result, you can enjoy the performance of a dedicated server with the automation of a virtualised cloud.
What’s more, the hardware used in bare metal environments is fully dedicated to the customer, which includes any additional storage. Bare metal instances can be provisioned via a web-based portal, and single servers can support larger workloads too.
The extensive potential of bare metal servers hasn’t gone unnoticed by the industry’s biggest players either. In September 2016, it was revealed that Oracle would go after Amazon by targeting power-hungry enterprise workloads with beefy, bare metal servers running in the cloud.
“In the near term, Oracle’s next-gen cloud will be interesting primarily to a general audience in a bare-metal context,” said Lydia Leong of Gartner. “It is a true software-defined cloud IaaS offering, provisioned in minutes and billed by the hour.”
Applications for the bare metal cloud
In the past, it wasn’t possible for organizations to perform short-term, data-intensive functions in the cloud. If they did, there would be poor performance levels and latency or overhead delays. But with a bare metal cloud, tasks like media encoding render farms are now completely conceivable.
For instance, when it comes to transcoding a user uploaded video, bare metal servers will remove any performance lag while delivering on-demand flexibility during data-intensive operations. It can then scale back down for normal usage and not waste any resources.
Another task perfectly suited to a bare metal environment is processing big data, as virtualised cloud servers often struggle to keep up with its high volume, high velocity nature. There are also the privacy privileges you can enjoy with bare metal servers because of greater control over the data’s location while keeping it segregated within a secure physical environment.
Remember that bare metal servers aren’t necessarily a replacement for virtualised environments. But with a collaborative approach between different cloud infrastructure services, your business can choose how best to support its core applications with the added advantages of maximising operational efficiency and reducing capital costs.
