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Packet vs Bigstep Metal

Packet has been growing steadily for last few years and we are very excited to see activity in the bare metal market. They are similar to us in many respects but there are areas where we differ significantly.

 Bigstep Metal CloudPacket
Bare metal
Yes
Yes
Self Service
Yes
Yes
Provisioning time
300 seconds
90 seconds
OS Volume
iscsi
fixed, given per config.
Additional storage volumes
iscsi block devices
iscsi block devices
On-demand
Yes (per second billing)
Yes (hourly)
Migration-less upgrade support
Yes
No
Stop and resume support
Yes
No
Self-service network config
Yes (L2 & L3)
Yes(L2 & L3)
L2 technology
MPLS
VLAN
Private LAN support
Yes
Yes
API enabled
Yes
Yes
Ipv6
Yes
Yes
BGP support
Yes (custom)
Yes(native)
Shared filesystem support
Yes (via GFS)
No
Database as a Service
Couchbase, Cassandra, Exasol, PostgreSQL, MySQL (Percona), Elasticsearch
No
Hadoop & Spark as a Service
Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks, Mesos
No
Native container platform
Yes (Bigstep Container Platform)
No
Container Apps
Apache Spark, Streamsets, Apache Kafka, Zoomdata
No
Object Storage
Yes (Bigstep DataLake service)
No

Why choose Bigstep?
 

Application provisioning

Bigstep has been focused on helping companies not just deploy bare metal but also help with the application side of things and hence we have many more perks such as deploying and scaling an Elasticsearch or Hadoop cluster.

Migration-less Upgrade

We also have an option that will prove very handy which we call Migration-less Upgrade. This means you can detach the OS from your server and attach it to another (bigger?) server self service, via the interface or API.

Stop-and-resume

The migration-less upgrade support not only saves you time but also allows other interesting features such as stop and resume support, allows growing (and snapshotting) the OS volume and others.

Why choose Packet?
 

OS on local drive

Packet installs the OS on the local drive which both good and bad. It is good because you don' t have to worry about the storage or storage network going down. It is bad because you have to worry about the NVMe or HDDs themselves going down. The jury is still out on which risk is higher. We believe that remote boot (our version) provides the best flexibility and the lowest cost. Local install provides better isolation and sometimes more performance.

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