Rackspace introduces next generation bare metal servers

This latest version of OnMetal Cloud Servers delivers innovative connectivity between public cloud and dedicated hardware and enables unprecedented hybrid cloud performance. Both Microsoft® and Linux workloads can now benefit from these next generation capabilities by capitalising on the flexibility of public cloud with the performance and security of bare metal servers.

OnMetal Cloud Servers are an ideal solution for customers looking to run workloads such as Cassandra, Docker®, Spark and Windows that require intensive data processing, raw compute power and the ability to quickly scale and deploy. This offering gives customers bare metal speed, with the control, security and consistent performance comparable to dedicated hardware. OnMetal Cloud Servers help increase efficiencies at scale, allowing customers to reduce the cost and complexity of their IT operations by consolidating workloads from many virtual environments to a few bare metal servers.

“The demands of modern cloud architecture and workloads like Cassandra are pushing the industry to find performance anywhere it can,” said Jonathan Ellis, co-founder at DataStax. “Running core infrastructure on hardware like Rackspace's OnMetal is the closest thing we have to an assured advantage: lower latency and more requests served with no changes to the code."

Rackspace customer Brigade, a political social networking app, has significantly increased their app’s performance and reliability with OnMetal Cloud Servers. The Rackspace bare metal offering has helped Brigade avoid performance limitations common with virtualised systems and utilise the increased consistency of a single-tenant cloud environment. According to Brigade, the first generation of OnMetal improved Brigade’s query times by 36.5x, from 7.3 seconds to 0.2 seconds.

“OnMetal has played a significant role in our ability to deliver the Brigade app with optimal uptime, and to innovate and grow the application with the performance of a dedicated environment,” said John Thrall, CTO of Brigade. “We’re excited to hear that Rackspace is offering next generation OnMetal, and we look forward to seeing what additional performance gains we can achieve with the upgraded product.”

The next generation of OnMetal Cloud Servers delivers to customers the following benefits and new features:

• Private and Secure Networking – Next generation of OnMetal Cloud Servers will integrate with Cloud Networks and RackConnect® (available in the second quarter of 2016) to provide enhanced levels of secure networking across all the Rackspace servers and devices within the customer’s environment.

• Increased International Availability – Next generation OnMetal Cloud Servers are available internationally, with regional coverage across the U.S. and U.K., decreasing latency for customers around the globe.

• Improved Storage Capabilities – Next generation OnMetal Cloud Servers are faster, higher capacity and more reliable than the first generation. The bare metal servers feature improvements of 250 percent in write performance, 40 percent in read performance and include up to 800 GB of local boot drive storage capacity. Also, they feature RAID 1 mirrored storage with two hot-swappable disks to improve uptime and help to reduce the risk of lost data.

• Hardware and Software Upgrades – Next generation OnMetal Cloud Servers are built on second generation Open Compute servers, featuring the latest Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. Additionally, the next generation of OnMetal Cloud Servers offers an improved selection of guest images, with support for Windows available in the second quarter of 2016.

“Rackspace is leading the OpenStack market with unparalleled technical innovation and operational expertise. With the fastest deployment times in the industry and unmatched performance, OnMetal is the leading bare metal offering and the largest public deployment of OpenStack Ironic in the world,” said Paul Voccio, vice president, software development, at Rackspace. “With the combination of new features and performance capabilities in the next generation of OnMetal, it can be a solution for many customers seeking OpenStack as the platform to run their most demanding workloads.”