The IT benefits of bare-metal clouds

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. The value of public clouds
  3. The importance of cloud architecture
  4. The limitations of virtualized clouds
  5. Bare metal overcomes public-cloud limitations
  6. Bare-metal cloud use cases
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About Paul Burns

1. Summary

Although public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds have been widely adopted to drive IT agility and deliver new business value, confusion still exists about their defining characteristics. Many in the IT industry believe that virtualized infrastructure is a requirement for cloud computing. In truth, however, both virtualized and bare-metal infrastructures are well suited for building clouds. And both types of infrastructure enable the defining characteristics of cloud computing, including resource pooling, metered consumption, self-service, and elasticity. The real question is how virtualized and bare-metal clouds are different, and in which cases the bare-metal option provides an advantage.

CIOs and CTOs want to know which type of cloud will help them meet their strategic IT objectives. Infrastructure architects want to understand where applications will run best. DevOps teams, meanwhile, want to learn which environment will help them deliver new applications quickly, and also manage them efficiently after deployment.

Virtualized clouds offer a convenient, ubiquitous source of cloud infrastructure but they don’t always deliver the performance, consistency, or control that IT organizations need in order to support their business’s mission-critical requirements. IT organizations frequently need bare metal clouds to run large relational databases, meet single-tenant data governance requirements, and build customized environments that match their on-premises configuration.

This report shows IT leaders how bare-metal clouds can help deliver greater value and efficiency than virtualized clouds alone, through consistent performance, hardware customization, security and risk management, and hybrid workloads.

Key findings of this report include:

  • Virtualized clouds are one option to consider, but IT leaders should not overlook the significant advantages of bare metal.
  • Prospective customers for bare-metal clouds should be selective, particularly when determining whether they will receive complete management, automation, and control through an API.
  • Adopting bare-metal clouds can resolve many of today’s IT challenges: poor performance, lack of control and customization, and complex risk management.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Elenathewise/iStock.

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