When you look at the marketplace, most cloud solution providers are offering virtualized compute. This means when you purchase a cloud server from them, it’s running in a virtualized environment and comes with a hypervisor. The physical server is shared between many users – potentially untrusted users – who may be slamming the server and causing resource contention. There could be security issues from sharing that server with different people, and there are certainly performance issues in terms of not having the whole server, as well as the overhead of the virtualization itself.
Why do virtualization and cloud go hand in hand?
Virtualization is an enabler for the cloud service delivery model. It’s easier to use virtualization to provision servers quickly, manage them over an API and then throw them away after a few hours. But a more interesting concept is figuring out a way to provision bare-metal servers without a hypervisor – just an operating system over an API – and allow customers to have the same cloud experience, but without virtualization and without a hypervisor. This works especially well for things like big data or even at-scale applications.
There’s a reason why big web properties like Facebook or Google generally aren’t using virtualization. They have no need to do so. They’ve got tools that allow them to treat their bare-metal physical servers with the same level of agility but with no hypervisor, no virtualization, and they don’t want to pay the virtualization performance tax. It’s a small tax, but it’s a tax nonetheless. Your application is going to run slower on a virtualized server rather than a bare-metal server.
Internap offers a bare-metal server with no hypervisor and no overhead – a server completely dedicated to the customer. The entire physical server, all the spinning disks and blinking lights, are just yours – you’re not sharing it with anyone. We can offer that server on a cloud-like model, meaning you can buy that server online through the API, have it delivered to you in a matter of minutes just like a virtualized server and throw it away when you don’t need it. The fact that we offer bare-metal servers but in a cloud-like manner is pretty interesting to our customers.
