Blue Box, a Seattle-based provider of private cloud as-a-service (PCaaS) to customers worldwide, has made available four new configurations for bare metal server implementations in its Blue Box Cloud PCaaS offering, powered by OpenStack. The new configurations help support hybrid implementations between bare metal and OpenStack clouds.
Popular with customers running workloads that require direct hardware access and high performance, bare metal server deployment delivers the full capabilities of the underlying hardware without the overhead consumed by a hypervisor.
The four bare metal configuration types just announced were built in response to the most frequent workloads Blue Box customers deploy. They are:
- Blue Box Cloud Bare Metal - The Blue Box Cloud Bare Metal offering would be perfect for commercial database applications. It provides a cost-efficient server for customers who require dedicated Web and application servers, queue processing or commercial database servers (MS SQL or Oracle).
- Blue Box Cloud Bare Metal High I/O - The Blue Box Cloud Bare Metal High I/O offering would provide superior performance for online transaction processing (OLTP) and traditional SQL and NoSQL database services and any other high I/O intensive workloads. Built with SSD storage, this configuration would also work well for high performance MySQL or Postgres databases.
- Blue Box Cloud Bare Metal High Memory – The High Memory Bare Metal server provides an answer for customers with heavy caching, search indexing and in-memory analytics applications. This configuration also would work well for both commercial and open source database packages.
- Blue Box Cloud Bare Metal High Storage Density – The Blue Box High Density Bare Metal servers offer 24TB of local storage, ideal for customers with heavy storage requirements.
“When our customers asked us for bare metal, we responded by giving them a deployment model that works in hybrid with our traditional, cloud infrastructure,” said Bob DeSantis, chief revenue officer at Blue Box. “Many customers want both bare metal options and hypervisor-based deployments that support the movement of workloads as development, testing and production needs dictate. That’s what we’ve given them with these four new bare metal configurations.”
Last January, Blue Box completed its Series B financing, bringing the total financing to $14 million. With this financing, Blue Box has planned to further build on its momentum and fuel continued product innovation. The company will invest in several key areas including adding additional talent on its engineering, sales and marketing, and business development teams, scaling its sales and marketing programs, and expanding its channel program.
