Rackspace has announced OnMetal Cloud Servers, an API-driven, single-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering designed for customers with rapidly growing infrastructure footprints who seek the agility and elasticity of cloud along with the simplicity and performance of dedicated servers.
“The rising complexity of the multi-tenant cloud affects applications in a variety of ways,” said Taylor Rhodes, president of Rackspace. “Virtualization 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 fast and lean with a laser-sharp focus on building out their product.”
Rackspace Hosting’s OnMetal Cloud Servers are built with Open Compute Project specified hardware and powered by OpenStack. The servers come in three different sets of specifications, each custom designed and built for workloads commonly associated with large web scale applications:
- Compute-optimized configuration – 20 threads and 32GB RAM; can be used to power large-scale web servers, application servers, queue processors and load balancers.
- Memory-optimized configuration – 24 threads and 512GB RAM; can be used to power caches, search indexes and in-memory analytics.
- I/O-optimized configuration – 40 threads, 128GB RAM, 3.2TB PCIe flash drive that can be used to power large NoSQL data stores, traditional SQL databases and OLTP applications.
“What’s exciting about bare metal with an API is that you get all the benefits of cloud infrastructures, such as full automation and writing software to manage your servers, but without any of the compromises on performance or reliability,” said Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, Inc. “Running CoreOS on OnMetal Cloud Servers, you get a host operating system that is optimized for efficiency and ready to run your container-based applications from first boot.”
Rackspace Hosting’s OnMetal Cloud Servers are available for testing under limited availability and expected to enter general availability in the Rackspace Northern Virginia data center this July. Customers outside of North America will have to wait a bit, as these dedicated server offerings with cloud characteristics will be available in Rackspace’s international data centers in 2015.
