Super computing performance for big data processing…two weeks on

It has been a few weeks now since we launched our new IaaS that uses bare metal power to bring supercomputing speeds to the commercial sector and provide a high-performance environment for big data applications.

It has been a really busy time, speaking with journalists, industry analysts, partners, customers, prospects and much more and we wanted to share a little of that with you now. 

Big data in the media
Big data has been a term familiar in the media for several years now. But few publications have approached big data from an infrastructure perspective. Until now that is.

Our launch highlighted the fact that virtual environments do not have the computing power to process big data efficiently and effectively. Removing the hypervisor make Bigstep faster, more powerful and a compelling proposition, according to these press reports of our launch:

V3 – “The advantage of this bare metal approach for operating big data applications is that it delivers the full processing power of the server hardware without the expense of running a hypervisor.”

FierceBigData – “Bigstep is a bare metal infrastructure which uses HP servers, with no hypervisors and all SSD flash storage – it will be interesting to see how the lack of hypervisors plays out in big data processing.”

Business Cloud News – “Many infrastructure as a service providers struggle to keep up with the scale of Amazon Web Services and its broad service ecosystem, Bigstep is looking to deliver high performance for very specific tasks – big data crunching applications.”

Big data in the cloud
It wasn’t just the press that bought into our proposition either. We’ve spoken with most of the major industry analyst organsations over the past few weeks and enjoyed a healthy and informed debate with all of them.

Discussions often focused on the nature and definition of the cloud. Of course, we use bare metal to generate such computing power, so people questioned whether we were ‘true’cloud providers. But we also offer the instant self-provisioning, cloning, snapshots and the pay-per-use billing model that are the cornerstones of the cloud model, so see ourselves very much as a cloud provider.

James Staten of Forrester stated that ‘if Bigstep turns out to match the hype it might just position itself effectively as a niche cloud platform well suited in complement to a general purpose cloud, such as AWS or Microsoft Windows Azure’. We couldn’t agree more!