IBM bolsters the SoftLayer cloud offering with the addition of OpenPOWER-based "bare metal" servers for customers making use of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product for data-intensive workloads.
Initially available in the US from Q2 2015 before eventual global expansion, the bare metal servers run Linux applications on IBM POWER8 architecture in "little endian" mode, a data handling mode compatible with x86 processors.
The SoftLayer bare metal server is the result of a collaboration with a couple of OpenPOWER Foundation members, namely server/workstation platform provider TYAN and InfiniBand and ethernet solution supplier Mellanox Technologies.
"The new OpenPOWER-based bare metal servers makes it easy for users to take advantage of one of the industry's most powerful and open server architectures," SoftLayer says. "The offering allows SoftLayer to deliver a higher level of performance, predictability and dependability not always possible in virtualized cloud environments.”
