Rackspace puts pedal to the metal with next-gen OnMetal
Rackspace has revamped its bare metal, single-tenant OnMetal Cloud Servers to boost connectivity and performance for demanding workloads.
The OnMetal Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack can be provisioned in minutes, Rackspace says, providing 'near instant scalability and elasticity'. They can run both Microsoft and Linux workloads with OpenStack-powered public cloud flexibility, Rackspace says.
It says the servers are 'an ideal solution' for customers wanting to run demanding 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," the vendor says.
"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 servers are built on second generation Open Compute servers and powered by Intel's Xeon E5-2600 v3 procesors and offer an improved selection of guest images, with support for Windows available in the second quarter of 2016.
The company says the bare metal servers feature improvements of 250% in write performance, 40% in read performance and include up to 800GB of local boot drive storage capacity.
Rackspace cites customer Brigade, which says it saw query times improve 36.5x from 7.3 seconds to 0.2 seconds using the first generation of OnMetal.
The also featre RAID 1 mirrored storage with two hot swappable disks to improve uptime and help reduce the risk of lost data.
Rackspace says the new generation of OnMetal Cloud Servers integrates with Cloud Networks and RackConnect, which will be available later this year, to provide enhanced secure networking across all Rackspace servers and devices within a customer's environment.
The next generation OnMetal Cloud Servers are available internationally with decreased latency, with regional coverage across the United States and United Kingdom.
