Rackspace has announced its OnMetal service which lets businesses hire the company’s bare metal servers as easy as renting a VM.
This could open up opportunities for those who want to hire dedicated clouds but have been hesitating as it is not so economical. Using OnMetal, companies can get the best of both worlds with easy server management and have the public cloud more flexible.
OnMetal does not virtualize the servers, which is a process that has been traditionally followed by cloud service providers to let companies share the servers for their different applications. With this service, each subscriber will get a dedicated server, in other words a bare-metal server exclusively for them.
Taylor Rhodes, announcing the service at Gigaom’s Structure Conference on Thursday, said “OnMetal is bare-metal servers that can be spun up instantly, in a matter of minutes, just like VMs can. Unlike VMs in multi-tenant clouds, though, these servers are highly specialized.”
Rackspace’s OnMetal is not a completely new concept as startup Docker has already introduced the concept of letting users have their own physical servers while also giving them the advantage of the public cloud followed by Google and Red Hat announcing similar services.
Besides big players like Google and Red Hat offering similar services, Rackspace’s OnMetal has a fat chance to catch on among developers who have been cold-shouldering the virtualization model.
The servers will have the specs mentioned in the open-source Open Compute Project and come with fast SSDs. Users will be able to customize their servers and synchronize the technology based on their compute, memory and input-output needs.
This OpenStack powered service will be available in three configurations initially which can further be customized according to needs. The company has also said that the servers will be tested before being made available generally in July. International datacenters could expect it in early 2015.
