Is Bare Metal Really “Cloud”?

Mar 24, 2016 | All Blogs, Cloud

The cloud computing industry is evolving. Cloud service providers like SoftLayer are finding ways to deliver the scalability and flexibility of virtual machines on bare metal hardware. But can we really call that “cloud”? Apparently yes and here’s why…

Forrester defines bare-metal cloud services as:

IaaS offerings that deliver dedicated physical infrastructure that does not include virtualization and is provisioned via the same type of cloud interface with the common characteristics of VM-based cloud offerings, including on-demand access, unlimited scale, and detailed resource accounting.

Virtual machine (VM)-based cloud services remain important, useful, and popular, but bare-metal offers some unique advantages. Your overall portfolio of services and service components will include cloud computing in a myriad of public and private forms. The resulting hybrid ecosystem, which includes many parts — cloud and non-cloud alike — presents you with plenty of opportunity to design and deliver an optimal customer experience.

Why use bare metal?

Deterministic performance. Your workload is running on a dedicated resource, so there is no question of any “noisy neighbor” problem, or even of sharing resources with otherwise well behaved neighbors.

Extreme low latency. Like it or not, VMs, even lightweight ones, impose some level of additional latency compared with bare-metal OS images. Where this latency is a factor, bare metal clouds offer a differentiated alternative.

Raw performance. Under the right conditions, a single bare-metal server can process more work than a collection of VMs because it does not incur the overhead of the hypervisor stack, even when their nominal aggregate performance is similar. Benchmarking is always tricky, but several bare-metal cloud vendors can show some impressive comparative benchmarks to prospective customers.

The best-fit workloads for bare-metal cloud

  • Time-critical bounded transactions and latency-sensitive workloads
  • Workloads where multi-tenancy is not acceptable but cloud agility is required
  • Gaming
  • Streaming media processing and other high I/O workloads
  • Streaming and real-time analytics such as ad insertion and social media analytics

 

Architecturally, you can view bare-metal cloud as an extension of a dedicated hosting environment, and many current bare-metal cloud providers had their roots in — and still provide — traditional hosting and managed services offerings. As a natural evolution of this business model, most bare metal cloud providers offer the option to combine dedicated hosting or managed services with their bare-metal cloud offerings. Customers can run the variable or flex portion of the workloads in the cloud environment and the stable production portions with minimal or at least predictable load variation in the dedicated environment.

Schedule a consultation today to learn more about the benefits of SoftLayer bare metal cloud solutions from Flagship.

If you liked this blog, you might also like:  2015: SoftLayer Highlights

logo-ibmStay connected online:

Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

 

IBM Cloud Services

Hybrid. Open. Secure. Cloud computing is at the center of dramatic innovation with mobile, data analysis and security as the enabler. Discover the continuum of choices for infrastructure, platform, and services to accelerate digital business.

  • IBM Cloud: POV on Hybrid Cloud Computing

  • An overview of IBM Cloud’s point of view on hybrid cloud computing and the hyper-portability that hybrid cloud solutions provide.

  • Infographic: IBM Leads Industry Toward Hybrid Clouds

  • Verisure collaborates in the security of the IBM Cloud

  • Jacob Andersson, Corporate Systems Manager at Verisure Innovation AB, explains how IBM Connections Cloud helps integrate business processes and connects people across their organization to innovate faster while helping to secure their valuable business information.Learn more about IBM Connections Cloud at ibmcloud.com/social

  • eBook – Forbes Insight – How the cloud is changing business resilience

  • Resiliency can be a competitive advantage, not merely a technical solution with a cost. The cloud enables a broader set of companies to consider a broader set of applications to grow their businesses in the expanding data universe.

  • Solution Brief: IBM Cloud Maturity Curve

  • Companies that have a mature organisational approach to cloud computing are more focused on business growth than cost reduction—and are more likely to have achieved that growth as well. They use a more diverse range of cloud services and are seeing improvements in the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. But while they say they have the required data-governance measures in place, privacy, security and compliance will continue to challenge even high-maturity organisations in the near future.

    These are the findings from Mapping the cloud maturity curve, an IBM research project conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit. The project defines “maturity” as it relates to the use of cloud computing (henceforth referred to as “cloud”) and measures how mature organisations are today.

    A previous report, entitled The fundamental five, drew on interviews with IT leaders to identify the core components of cloud maturity. Organisations’ progress along this maturity curve was then investigated through a global survey of 784 IT and business executives (see “About the study” for a detailed description of how maturity was scored). This report is an in-depth analysis of the findings of the survey and incorporates further insights from senior IT leaders to identify how they are moving their organisations up the cloud maturity curve. 

  • Presentation: IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Point Of View

  • Presentation: IBM Cloud

  • Report: Is Bare Metal Really “Cloud”?

  • Virtual server flexibility on dedicated hardware

    The cloud computing industry is evolving. Cloud service providers like SoftLayer are finding ways to deliver the scalability and flexibility of virtual machines on bare metal hardware. But can we really call that “cloud”? 

    To tackle that question, Forrester Research put together a detailed report to evaluate bare metal’s capabilities in IaaS. 

    Download this free analyst report to learn about:

    • How bare metal measures up against virtual machines
    • What workloads are best suited for bare metal
      cloud
    • How SoftLayer measures up against other bare
      metal cloud providers

  • Tangerine Bank uses IBM cloud solutions to enhance customers’ mobile experience

  • Canadian bank Tangerine gathers customer feedback and actionable insight on its mobile banking app. Using IBM Mobile Quality Assurance for Bluemix™ service, Tangerine streamlined QA, sped development and improved the customer experience. http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/solutionsStay in Touch: http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/solutionsSubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/IBMCustomerReferenceIBM Client References: https://www.youtube.com/user/IBMCustomerReferenceFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ibmcloud

  • Hybrid cloud helps IBM clients meet business needs

  • This video describes how IBM’s hybrid cloud solutions can help with three major areas:- Portability of applications to move applications closer to the data or data closer to the applications- Visibility and control to provide robust governance and coordination to prevent, pinpoint and resolve problems across a hybrid environment. – Developer productivity by securely connecting apps, data and services and providing the ability to experiment and rapidly iterate cloud app development for hybrid environments.

  • Building a cloud road map

  • Find out how to strategically move your business towards a more nimble hybrid cloud solution. Cloud expert Tim Vanderham walks through the process of integrating cloud into your existing IT architecture. To learn more, take a look at The Steps to Cloud Expertise Series: http://www.ibm.com/cloud/expertise

  • Solve the Challenges of Mobile App Delivery

  • Cloud and mobile solutions from IBM are inspiring IT leaders to meet all challenges of the mobile app development cycle. IBM enables businesses to quickly deliver quality, high-performing mobile apps, transform customer experiences and empower employees – all with a flexible infrastructure that can scale to handle growing demands.Learn More: http://ibm.biz/mobilecloud Stay in Touch: Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/IBMCloud IBM Client References: https://www.youtube.com/user/IBMCustomerReference Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ibmcloud