Why Super Speed Matters in the Cloud

Demand for low-latency networks used to be limited to time-critical, capital-intensive applications like financial trading. Today, however, organizations of every type are moving and processing massive volumes of data, and doing so quickly is increasingly critical. Latency isn’t that big a deal for things like typical cloud business apps, but when large amounts of data need to be processed, a little latency here and there really adds up. Today’s organizations want to be able to analyze data and gain insights in as close to real-time as possible.

For businesses and other organizations processing big data, not only is the scalable, “wide mouth” of Hadoop necessary, but as much latency as possible needs to be squeezed out of the process. When you have time-sensitive processing tasks, doing those tasks faster than the competition is a real advantage. Therefore, businesses have to determine where latency comes from and eliminate as much of it as possible. Squeezing as much latency as possible out of cloud applications requires the use of bare metal computing, plus networking and storage solutions that also minimize latency.

Bare Metal Computing

Bare metal power for speed and performance is one way to reduce latency. Bare metal computing removes the hypervisor that has become such a staple of cloud applications. With no resource-consuming hypervisor, all switching is done on physical network equipment, which reduces latency considerably and frees up server processing resources. With bare metal computing, the resources of physical servers are dedicated to individual users, offering much faster performance than a comparable server that’s virtualized. Bare metal computing offers greater processing power and more input / output operations per second. It also offers more consistent disk performance and relieves worries about “noisy neighbors” that can slow down a multitenant environment.

Fast Networking

But bare metal computing’s blazing speed doesn’t benefit users as much when the networking is slow. That’s why providers that want to reduce latency as much as possible use pseudo-wire networking. This is a way to emulate various networking services across packet-switched networks while delivering the stripped-down functionality and speed of a wired connection. In other words, with pseudo-wire networking, machines communicate over the internet as if they’re connected in the same switch, and the technique can cut latency down to 5 to 10 microseconds.

Fast Storage

Storage is another place that latency can manifest, but there are ways to reduce latency related to storage. Solid state drive (SSD) storage is many times faster than storage with mechanical drives, so a provider that offers all-SSD storage as well as fast networking and bare metal computing eliminates even more latency. Centralized, all-SSD storage eliminates I/O bottlenecks, so that applications that are heavy on I/O can achieve dramatic performance increases. With SSD storage at line rate speed, users can achieve exceptionally high speeds between compute instances.

Conclusion

As more industries turn to big data, architecture and platform selection become increasingly important as eliminating latency becomes a higher priority. Latency that’s perfectly acceptable in non-big data applications can be unacceptable when processing of massive amounts of data. But many organizations want the convenience and flexibility of the cloud, and others simply don’t have the resources to buy their own metal and run it on-site - particularly when the need for such computing power is intermittent.

With Bigstep’s Bare Metal Cloud, users get bare metal computing, fast pseudo-wire connectivity, and all-SSD storage so that latency is reduced at every opportunity. If your application requires this level of speed, Bare Metal Cloud offers minimal latency, as well as the convenience and scalability of a cloud solution, so you get the best of all worlds.