While the cloud is still the go-to infrastructure solution for flexibility and scale, today’s applications and systems often require higher performance than traditional virtualized cloud can provide.
Compute-intensive workloads, such as those focused on analytics and big data, typically need high disk I/O, high throughput and extremely low latency to perform efficiently. But the need for increased performance and scale can push the limits of virtual cloud environments, resulting in performance degradation and volatility.
The value of bare-metal IaaS
To address these concerns in a cost-efficient manner, bare-metal Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has emerged as a non-virtualized alternative. Bare-metal IaaS provides the performance of dedicated servers with the automation and on-demand capabilities of cloud services.
Since 2012, Internap customers with performance-centric workloads – such as eXelate, Taptica, Distil Networks, CrowdStar and others – have built global, scale-out application environments using AgileSERVER, our automated bare-metal IaaS, as part of their infrastructure.
AgileSERVER on OpenStack
Today, our bare-metal AgileSERVER got even better. We introduced the general availability of AgileSERVER powered by OpenStack. In keeping with our commitment to high performance, this new version of our bare-metal IaaS solution includes significant compute, networking, management, and hybridization capabilities.
Compute
The new version of AgileSERVER gives Internap customers access to PCI Express NVM storage, which operates at the processor level and removes bottlenecks from a SATA/SAA controller. This translates into insanely high IOPS and read/write speeds, which provide significant performance benefits for big data and analytics use cases. This can also reduce costs because it requires fewer servers, and speeds up developer productivity.
In addition to the latest generation of storage technology, AgileSERVER 2.0 offers a wide range of memory options up to 1TB RAM to meet high-performance needs.
Networking
Advanced networking features offer deployment flexibility and enhanced security to the network. With access to 10 VLANs per account, companies that must adhere to strict compliance guidelines such as PCI compliance can ensure sensitive information is kept separate from servers on other VLANs. A payment processor would likely require segmentation of the cardholder data environment to meet PCI security requirements.
For increased redundancy, NIC bonding supports separation of customer and management networks and removes single points of failure. This allows for seamless failovers to avoid downtime and reduce impact on application performance.
Each account provides 10TB of Universal Transfer bandwidth per month for IP and CDN traffic, making it easier to manage costs. This is included in the cost of hardware to enable bandwidth sharing across environments.
Management
Built on the native OpenStack API, AgileSERVER provides access to the entire OpenStack ecosystem of tools. This means you can manage bare-metal instances through the OpenStack API or portal, including the Horizon dashboard and also orchestrate entire stack deployments via Heat and Glance for autoscaling and image management of infrastructure. Provision bare-metal servers in minutes and manage them through CLI, API or portal, and take advantage of new term-based and usage-based billing down to the second. This allows you to meet changing capacity needs on-demand in a cost-effective manner.
Hybridization
Create a best-fit environment to meet the unique needs of your applications. Through a common portal, you can manage Internap’s OpenStack-based AgileCLOUD virtual cloud instances, as well as colocation, managed hosting, or on-premise infrastructure. DevOps teams migrating different types of applications to the cloud can mix and match different types of environments to ensure optimal performance without the need for creative, manual networking.
Ultimately, bare-metal AgileSERVER gives our customers better performance at a lower price. The ability to hybridize your infrastructure using OpenStack management tools represents a milestone for DevOps teams that need to build high-performance environments.
