Now that most IT organizations have transitioned some of their infrastructure to the cloud, the game has changed yet again. While you may have already moved your email applications, disaster recovery, ERP or CRM systems to the cloud, now your CEO wants to incorporate big data, business intelligence and predictive analytics into the corporate strategy. But these large enterprise applications require more computing power than your current cloud architecture can support. How can you accommodate the CEO’s requests without sacrificing performance and inviting problems from noisy neighbors?
In an effort to not throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water, IT is faced with the challenge of using the current cloud infrastructure to meet the requirements of these new systems. A one-size-fits-all cloud solution doesn’t work for most enterprises, and few businesses can afford to sacrifice the automation and flexibility of the cloud and start manually provisioning physical servers again. Diversifying your infrastructure to include bare-metal cloud can help fill this gap. Bare metal provides the high performance processing capabilities of a dedicated environment, with the service delivery model of the cloud.
Establishing a mixed cloud environment
Understanding the requirements of your use case will help determine which mix of cloud is right for you. Workloads that require high disk I/O are usually better suited for physical, dedicated servers. Bare-metal cloud provides a new way to leverage cloud technology for high-performance, data-intensive workloads, such as big data applications and media encoding. Since bare-metal servers do not run a hypervisor, are not virtualized and are completely dedicated, including storage, you don’t have to worry about noisy neighbors or overhead delays.
Bare-metal cloud can be used in conjunction with virtualized cloud infrastructure to meet a wider range of business requirements. IT managers can balance the capabilities of various cloud models to create a cost-effective operating environment. This reduces capital costs, is operationally efficient and establishes a foundation for agility through adaptable hosting models. At the same time, businesses investigating virtualized clouds as their only hosting solution often prefer to host many of their high-performance, and most complex, applications internally. The bare-metal cloud offers an alternative to virtualized clouds and in-house environments, positioning IT managers to maximize the value of their application and service architectures.
The value of diversity
The ability to create a mixed cloud environment means cloud computing now offers more options than traditional virtualization, while still providing flexibility, scalability and utility-based pricing models. Using different types of cloud together provides organizations with exponentially more opportunities for cost-effective infrastructure.
As the cloud has evolved to include public, private, hybrid and now bare-metal options, IT now has more opportunities to create the right cloud mix to meet the needs of the enterprise. Taking a workload-centric approach can help establish a more strategic, cost-effective cloud solution. The bare-metal cloud is an integral part of an agile infrastructure that allows IT to efficiently meet the demands of business-critical applications.
