Why bare metal cloud gives a winning performance

There is an elephant in the room when it comes to virtualisation. Of course there are many benefits, but ultimately virtualisation eats performance and its speed just doesn’t compare to that of bare-metal. It’s not just us saying that either, it’s a whole variety of industry experts that have spoken on and researched at length on the subject. We look at the limits of virtualisation, why speed is so important and why bare-metal has no peer when it comes to speed and performance.

Speed is of the essence with big data
The ability to glean business insight from an organisation’s big data is precious – to do so in real-time is more valuable still. But virtual environments struggle to deliver big data analysis in the required time frames.

Much independent research has been conducted into this topic. Computing expert and blogger, Peter Senna was one of the first. In his 2011 benchmarking study he revealed that on average the performance overhead associated with virtualisation can lead to 25% slower network I/O and around 2.4 times slower disk latency.

IBM has conducted similar analysis, finding that even with direct device assignment, guests are still unable to approach bare-metal performance. When running queries on terabyte-levels of big data, such a difference in speed can have a real impact on a business.

Bare metal cloud = superior performance
So for any organisation with I/O intensive workloads, a virtualised infrastructure is not the best fit. That’s certainly the view of GigaSpaces CTO & Founder Nati Shalom, who estimated that based on the different benchmarks, running I/O intrusive workloads (big data) on a virtualised infrastructure would require ‘three times more resources than its bare metal equivalent’.

We are inclined to agree and felt such a difference in performance was unacceptable. Three times more resources is an astounding amount, with massive overhead and cost implications. So we decided to put a stop to virtualisation in the cloud and offer businesses a genuine alternative, with our bare metal cloud.

Hypervisors waste at least 20% the bare metal power of servers and our big data infrastructure can deliver a much superior performance with the same resources. Removing the extra layer between an OS and the server makes a world of difference when it comes to speed and performance.

Virtual environments are not powerful enough to process big data at the speeds required by business. Big data processing requires a high-performance computing infrastructure and virtualisation is not that.

This can be somewhat overlooked as people focus on virtualisation’s other benefits. But big data is a business trend that will not go away, ever-growing floods of information about a business that can bring enormous competitive advantage. But to deliver real benefit it needs to be accessed and processed in real-time and the best way of achieving this is by using a bare metal cloud, with the computing power to handle such large volumes of data.