Rackspace Hosting announced offering bare-metal cloud servers that can be provisioned dynamically “as quickly as a VM.”
The Rackspace OnMetal Cloud Servers are API-driven, single-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service servers designed for customers with rapidly growing infrastructure footprints who seek the agility and elasticity of cloud along with the simplicity and performance of colocation. Testing is underway and general availability of the service is expected in July via the Rackspace data center in Northern Virginia.
OnMetal Cloud Servers are built with Open Compute Project spec’d hardware and powered by OpenStack. The servers come in three different sets of specifications, each custom designed and built for workloads commonly associated with large web scale applications:
Compute-optimized configuration – 20 threads and 32GB RAM; can be used to power large-scale web servers, application servers, queue processors and load balancers.
Memory-optimized configuration – 24 threads and 512GB RAM; can be used to power caches, search indexes and in-memory analytics.
I/O-optimized configuration – 40 threads, 128GB RAM, 3.2TB PCIe flash drive that can be used to power large NoSQL data stores, traditional SQL databases and OLTP applications.
“The rising complexity of the multi-tenant cloud affects applications in a variety of ways,” said Taylor Rhodes, president of Rackspace. “Virtualization and sharing a physical machine are fantastic tools for specific workloads at certain scale; however, we’ve learned that the one-size-fits-all approach to multi-tenancy just doesn’t work once you become successful, so we created OnMetal to simplify scaling for customers to stay fast and lean with a laser-sharp focus on building out their product.”
“We’ve all been trained to think of the cloud as generic virtual machines on demand. VMs have had their decade. The future ‘Cloud’ will be built with containers deployed across bare-metal servers provisioned via API,” said Zack Rosen, CEO of Pantheon, a Rackspace customer in the early access program of OnMetal Cloud Servers. ”We believe Rackspace’s OnMetal service is the future of Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It’s simply more efficient — you get the performance and cost-efficiency of single-tenant servers and agility with containers that blows away what you can do with VMs.”
