Rackspace Goes Onmetal

Rackspace has launched Onmetal Cloud Servers, a service that combines the on-demand nature and scalability of cloud servers with the performance and total control of bare-metal servers.

The Onmetal Cloud Servers service will be available from July, initially at Rackspace’s Northern Virginia data centre only, but is expected to roll out internationally during 2015.

The service brings all the power and flexibility of cloud computing to applications previously considered unsuitable to run in a virtualised environment, according to the firm. It is an API-driven, single-tenant infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that enables customers to provision dedicated servers with whatever operating system and services stack they require.

Rackspace has been looking at bare-metal provisioning since at least last year, when the firm introduced its Performance Cloud Servers tier for customers with more demanding workloads. However, there has been growing interest in the ability to own the entire server, according to the firm, because of the “noisy neighbour” problem in multi-tenant environments, where another workload on the same host may degrade network latency, disk input/output (I/O) and compute processing power.

Rackspace president Taylor Rhodes said, “Virtualisation and sharing a physical machine are fantastic tools for specific workloads at certain scale; however, we’ve learned that the one-size-fits-all approach to multi-tenancy just doesn’t work once you become successful, so we created Onmetal to simplify scaling for customers to stay lean and fast with a laser-sharp focus on building out their product.”

Onmetal Cloud Servers make use of the Ironic Bare Metal Provisioning project in the Openstack cloud computing framework. This is still in incubation rather than a full core part of Openstack, but Rackspace has a policy of introducing cutting-edge features in its cloud services.

The physical hardware itself is compliant with Open Compute Project specifications, and available in three different tiers aimed at specific workloads.

These comprise a compute-optimised configuration for application servers supporting 20 threads and 32GB memory, while a memory-optimised configuration for tasks such as in-memory analytics supports 24 threads and 512GB.

An I/O-optimized configuration supports 40 threads with 128GB memory and a 3.2TB PCI Express flash drive. The latter is best for traditional databases, NoSQL and online transaction-processing applications, Rackspace said.

Pricing has not been disclosed, but Rackspace said customers will be able to pay by the minute, with utility-style billing only for the resources they use.

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Benefits of Cloud Computing

In a nutshell Cloud Computing is the process of having on-demand hosted computing services provided outside your own network environment through a vendor’s Public or Private Data Center. Cloud Computing can be broken into three distinct categories. They are SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and PaaS (Platform as a Service).

Even though the concepts of Cloud Computing have been around for years, it still remains in its infancy. However, its adoption rate has been rather explosive lately, due in part to its seamlessness and ease of information integration.Cloud Computing has many benefits for medium and small businesses by way of collaboration and Productivity. For instance users will have the ability to work on the same projects in real-time from any location whether it’s the office, at home or an overseas location, at any time. The office never closes.

Another reason Cloud Computing has become so enticing is businesses can cut expenses on hardware and IT staffing to support the very same services as if they were on-site (Break/Fix issues are resolved by the vendor and the customer is never aware since services are redundant). Security is also enhanced because leading vendors adhere to higher levels of security features that are cost prohibitive to most medium and small businesses. In these days of high profile data breaches added security is must have.

Businesses should also consider their IT teams will not have a steep learning curve adapting to Cloud based services, since most user environment applications are similar in design to those they are accustomed to using today. Another added convenience is that Cloud Computing rids businesses of the old and costly software licensing requirement for every application/user. Cloud Computing allows the business to buy services on a time/usage metric.

If your business is looking to stay agile and save money, Cloud Computing may be the right direction to move.