RackSpace's OnMetal for Bare Metal Cloud Infrastructure
Many organizations fear operating in a multi-tenant environment because of the unpredictability of the virtualized system. RackSpace’s solution to this is called RackSpace OnMetal.
This bare metal cloud hosting offering is setup to ease the concerns of those who want to use the cloud but do not want to share physical server resources. Although the public cloud makes sense for many organizations, going bare metal has some inherit advantages. Once you go bare metal, you typically won’t need to use a hypervisor that sets your computing loads alongside the computing load of another organization. This protects you from attacks where malicious code somehow breaks outside of the hypervisor and begins attacking other data within the public cloud. Although these attacks are rare, they do cause some organizations concerns.
RackSpace OnMetal can be powered up and running in less than 1 minute using the OpenStack API. All of the OnMetal servers feature solid state drives which make working and interacting with the OnMetal cloud fast and responsive. Two pricing packages are available for the RackSpace OnMetal. OnMetal Compute is the lower tier and the package includes 10 Intel Xeon CPUs and 32GBs of Ram.
The next tier is called the OnMetal Memory package. This package comes with 12 CPU cores, 512GB of Ram. RackSpace mentions that these types of server are best used for caching and in-memory analytics or search indexing operations.
If you break down the pricing structure of RackSpace’s OnMetal, it’s not much different from what competitors are offering. RackSpace locks you into the monthly charge versus an hourly charge. Additional support packages for OnMetal start at $200 per month. Why do people want bare metal cloud servers? RackSpace’s blog mentions, “Some of them are looking to move away from the unpredictable nature of virtualized, multi-tenant environments, while others are intrigued by our promise of ‘elasticity of the cloud, plus economy of collocation.”
