As an early leader in the bare-metal cloud space, we at Internap are pleased to be one of only a handful of providers profiled in Forrester’s new research report, Consider Bare Metal as a Viable Cloud Option.
As more applications and workloads demand high-performance infrastructure, the market for bare-metal cloud has increased rapidly. More vendors are claiming to offer bare-metal capabilities, and like the common practice of “cloud washing,” infrastructure is now being “metal-washed.”
Not every provider who advertises bare-metal cloud can deliver it. Consumers should be wary of vendors that are metal washing other services such as dedicated hosting, which, unlike bare-metal cloud, is often sold on a term contract and offers zero automation or elasticity.
Internap is proud to be part of the small but notable class of bare-metal providers covered in Forrester’s report.
Virtualization does not equal cloud
As we experience the evolution of dedicated servers, cloud is no longer synonymous with virtualization. Bare-metal cloud isn’t virtualized, and offers the ability to deploy dedicated bare-metal servers in cloud-like fashion, giving access to single tenant physical resources without noisy neighbors or resource contention. Available on an hourly basis, bare-metal cloud delivers the automation and elasticity of traditional virtualized cloud, along with the higher IOPS and disk I/O required by performance-sensitive workloads.
For certain segments of our Internap customer base, high performance is crucial. Adtech, online gaming and big data workloads rely on dedicated infrastructure with extremely low latency to make sure their transactions take place within a certain time limit. Forrester refers to these as “bounded transactions,” and for some of our customers, this window of time is 75 milliseconds. Bare-metal cloud offers significant advantages regarding performance and cost efficiency for these types of transactions.
As an early leader in the bare-metal cloud space, we believe Forrester’s report serves as validation of what we’ve observed across our customer base for the past four years. Bare-metal cloud is also gaining momentum within the global OpenStack community.
