Bare Metal as a Service – Back to the Future

Bare metal use cases and business benefits of bare metal as a service

Companies today have a wide range of options when it comes to managing vital IT infrastructure, including data, applications, networks, and workloads. Each option must be carefully evaluated to make sure it delivers the best combination of performance, flexibility, cost, location, security, and other important factors.

For many companies, turning to bare metal – delivered as a service in colocation data centers – can be the perfect way to meet these demanding requirements. As a quick overview, bare metal servers are physical, not virtual, but don’t include an operating system or virtualization layer. They are single-tenant machines whose resources are dedicated to just one company.

Bare-metal-as-a-service (BMaaS) is a service model where a provider, like DataBank, preconfigures and deploys in its secure data centers a variety of physical bare metal servers that customers can select, access remotely, and begin using immediately. BMaaS can provide a full stack of capabilities (storage, networking, and computing) with cloud-like deployment and management. When neither cloud nor colocation meets the need, BMaaS can give companies the speed, scalability, and pay-as-you-grow capability of a cloud service but with the freedom, performance, security, and control of a colocation service.

BMaaS offers a Goldilocks solution: It can be the “just right” choice that provides the best of all worlds when it comes to performance, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. The industry is not just noticing, it’s booming: The Bare Metal Cloud Market size is projected to grow from $6.6B in 2023 to more than $34B by 2032 – a 22.8% CAGR. This growth trajectory should instill confidence in your decision to consider BMaaS.

Benefits of Bare Metal in Colocation Data Centers

Bare metal and BMaaS in colocation facilities may be an ideal fit for companies looking to capitalize on the best elements of colocation and cloud hosting. A wide range of employees and potential buyers – titles including chief information officers, chief technology officers, IT engineers, and many more – are interested in capitalizing on bare metal.

Whether they’re looking to reduce their initial capital investment in compute, storage, and networking devices, avoid over- or under-committing to future capacity, or increase scalability (or all the above!), buyers are turning to bare metal for a wide range of benefits:

Performance: Bare metal meets requirements for high-performance applications or workloads by eliminating layers of virtualization. The company’s specific operating system runs directly on the server hardware, successfully reducing overhead that can cause performance issues.

Flexibility: Imagine the case of a CTO who wants to test a particular workload but may have a hard time justifying the cost of purchasing new servers or paying high data egress fees. In this case, the company can add as many bare metal machines as they need in a colocation facility – without ever stepping foot in the data center – giving them a fast, flexible, on-demand resource without the need to reside in another vendor’s environment.

Scalability: Similarly, BMaaS enables companies to quickly scale resources up or down to handle changing demand or traffic patterns. They can also quickly replicate environments on a cloud-like basis, without potential constraints that typically exist with virtualized solutions.

Control: Larger enterprises may have well-established systems and demanding requirements and do not want to fit into someone else’s hosting model. They prefer an industry-standard, closed environment that gives them the ability to develop, test, deploy, and support their workloads, without signing up for extra services they may not need.

Cost: Bare metal servers give companies an extremely flexible billing option. Instead of buying servers – a potentially expensive CapEx investment – companies rent server capacity on an ongoing OpEx model to keep costs low. Additionally, BMaaS engagements offer contracts that are much less complicated than the typical cloud offering.

Edge presence: Many companies look to increase their presence at the edge to minimize latency and better serve their customers. Increasingly, this means high volumes of data need to be sent to the edge, which may not be possible with hyperscalers or could result in high egress fees. Colocation data centers are situated across North America (and the world), giving companies an effective way to accomplish their edge vision and goals.

Deployment time: Bare metal servers provide one other significant benefit: speed to market. In this case, many colocation hosting providers will have proactively planned for scaling the infrastructure and have servers ready to go now, which is a significant advantage in avoiding delays and getting started quickly.

Bare metal offers unparalleled performance, reliability, security, and flexibility, making it ideal for demanding workloads and mission-critical applications. – Datacenters.com

Bare Metal Use Cases

• Application and systems development: Development teams can use BMaaS to develop and test new applications, which may require special infrastructure or platforms that may be managed with a traditional cloud service. Developers may also want to avoid being locked into long-term commitments, especially if they anticipate their needs will change for future development projects.
• High-Performance Computing (HPC): Companies using deep learning, AI automation, quantum computing, 3D printing, and other examples of advanced computing must process extremely large volumes of data quickly. They may even require the use of graphic process units (GPUs) instead of CPUs to handle workload requirements. BMaaS can tailor the hardware components in a dedicated server to meet the specific needs of an HPC workload.
• Low latency/edge computing: Companies in finance, telecom, and content deliver (video streaming) industries all run applications that require low latency and real-time delivery to end users. This often requires strategic placement of data and compute resources – at the edge – to best meet these goals and provide ideal experiences. BMaaS allows these types of companies to replicate and quickly deploy their custom applications on multiple servers closer to their end users.
• Dedicated private computing for high security: Also, various legal, government, healthcare and financial entities running applications that require extremely high security embrace BMaaS. Bare metal helps them reduce security threats by eliminating the sharing of hardware resources for operating systems, CPU, memory, storage, and networking.
• Game server hosting: BMaaS meets the high-performance, low latency, high availability and flexibility needs of gaming application developers and publishers. Bare metal servers hosted in a high-availability colocation data center provide guaranteed uptime, performance, and scalability needed for delivering a positive gaming experience.

E-commerce website and applications: Single-tenant, dedicated bare metal servers provide the security, performance, and high availability needed for successful e-commerce experiences, and allow infrastructure to be quickly and economically scaled to meet fluctuating demand on a pay-for-use basis.

Big data analytics: Companies managing enormous amounts of data can experience unpredictability and unacceptable performance issues using shared services on public cloud platforms. Bare metal can give them more control and performance while still offering the cost savings and flexibility found with public cloud deployments.

The Bare Metal Advantage

When compared to cloud computing, bare metal may seem to be an outdated approach to compute and infrastructure hosting. Yet bare metal in colocation facilities may be an ideal fit for companies looking to capitalize on the best elements of colocation and cloud hosting.

Many companies are now taking a step back after finding that virtualized cloud platforms may be too restrictive for their needs or more expensive than anticipated. With its ability to deliver fast deployments, reliable performance and scalability, edge solutions, and more, bare metal delivers a best-of-all worlds approach capable of delivering significant business value.

Interested in learning more? Contact us today to learn more about DataBank’s colocation offerings, including bare metal.