Why Does Bare Metal + Cloud = Better?

Companies cope with exponentially more data than they had just a few years ago. The sheer number of devices that create and transmit data has proliferated worldwide, and the volume of data produced has exploded. The world needs new, more powerful tools to make sense of all that data. IBM says that in 2012, 2.5 exabytes (2.5 billion GB) of data were generated every day, and it hasn’t exactly slowed down in the two years since. The amount of data being generated can only continue to grow.

Organizations that use big data quickly learn that a speed advantage that may be nice, but not noticeable in running everyday applications is critical when it comes to crunching big data. One way they can gain that critical speed advantage is with bare metal computing.

What Is Bare Metal Computing?

Imagine having a room full of the fastest servers in the world and having running your data processes directly on as many of them as you need. Lag due to the cloud isn’t a big deal when you’re using the cloud to write a document or spreadsheet, but when you’re processing massive amounts of data, it makes a considerable difference. Bare metal computing lets you run a process directly on the server, without the overhead of a hypervisor.

Bare Metal Gets You Speed

With virtualization, you generally access the physical hardware through a hypervisor, which filters and interprets every request made by an application. Moreover, you may not know the quality of the hardware or its workload. Could you be using outdated hardware provided by a vendor who has oversold their infrastructure? It’s possible. Virtual machines are moved from server to server, and performance can change at any time, so it’s difficult to predict how many virtual machines you may need. Bare metal computing gives you the power of having the fastest servers, without the slowdowns associated with virtualization. 

Cloud Gets You Flexibility and Scalability

Having your own fast hardware on the premises is great, but it’s expensive, and what if you only need to use it occasionally, or for a one-off project? The cloud was made for these situations, although you generally give up speed due to the overhead of virtualization. But what if you could combine the speed of bare metal computing with the convenience, flexibility, and scalability of the cloud in one solution?

Full Metal Cloud Gets More from Bare Metal Computing

BigStep’s Bare Metal Cloud generates the maximum performance from bare metal computing, and gives you the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. One reason Full Metal Cloud is so fast is its extremely fast network. With 4 to 40 Gbps connectivity at the machine level, and a dedicated Layer 2 domain for each client, the user can, for instance, connect the ports in two machines just like they were both plugged into the same switch. 

Another Full Metal Cloud maximizes performance from bare metal computing is all-SSD pseudo-distributed storage. Distributed SSD storage allows extremely high I/O storage to all machines, no matter the size. Deployed exclusively on enterprise SSD drives, each storage block works like the typical storage volume, and can be moved between instances, or simply saved for later, without needing to be attached to a node.

With SSD storage accessible at line rate speed, users can reach I/O speeds of up to 40 Gbps between Full Metal Compute Instances an attached storage blocks. This eliminates I/O bottlenecks. The result? A single Full Metal Compute Instance reads and writes at a speed equivalent to more than 13 local SSD drives. As just one example, compared with Amazon Web Services, Full Metal Cloud reads and writes 1 TB of data in 52 seconds (versus 207 and 212 seconds, respectively, for AWS). 

Conclusion

Bare metal computing, by not being virtualized, operates with the speed of a dedicated physical server, without the overhead of a cloud hypervisor slowing things down. Our Full Metal Cloud derives amazing performance from bare metal computing due to its extremely fast connectivity and all-SSD storage and lets you access it as a service. 

If you need the speed of bare metal computing, but don’t have the budget to fund that kind of hardware, Full Metal Cloud puts that speed in your hands, along with the convenience, affordability, and scalability of the cloud. With Full Metal Cloud, you get the fastest connectivity and storage, so you never have to compromise on performance, while enjoying the benefits of a cloud solution.