Rackspace announces OnMetal Cloud Servers-- a single-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering for elastic computing and scaling applications promising to eliminate the issues of noisy neighbors in multi-tenant environments.
"The rising complexity of the multi-tenant cloud affects applications in a variety of ways,” Rackspace says. “Virtualisation 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.”
In other words, OnMetal promises the agility and elasticity of the cloud with the simplicity and performance of colocation, as customers will be able spin API-driven bare-metal servers as quickly as VMs.
OnMetal machines are built using Open Compute specs and OpenStack. They come in 3 configurations-- compute-optimised (20 threads and 32GB RAM for large-scale web servers, application servers, queue processors, load balancers), memory-optimised (24 threads and 512GB RAM for power caches, search indexes, in-memory analytics) and I/O optimised (40 threads, 128GB RAM, 3.2TB PCIe flash drive to power large NoSQL data stores, traditional SQL databases and OLTP applications).
Rackspace adds all OnMetal servers are solid-state and armed with 10-gigabit networking, with no hypervisors or virtualisation tax.
OnMetal Cloud Servers are in limited testing phase, and should be available in N. America from the Rackspace N. Virginia data centre on July 2014 before international availability on 2015.
