Rackspace's Upgraded Bare Metal Servers Integrate OpenStack

Several companies have been focusing on appliances and servers that incorporate OpenStack, and essentially make deploying an OpenStack cloud an unboxing experience. Now, Rackspace has announced new "OnMetal Cloud Servers" integrating OpenStack -- bare metal, single-tenant servers that are API-provisioned in what the company claims is two minutes, "providing near-instant scalability and elasticity."

This latest version of OnMetal Cloud Servers delivers connectivity between public cloud and dedicated hardware and enables hybrid cloud performance, too. Both Microsoft and Linux workloads can run on them.

According to the company:

"OnMetal Cloud Servers are an ideal solution for customers looking to run workloads such as Cassandra, Docker, Spark and Windows that require intensive data processing, raw compute power and the ability to quickly scale and deploy. This offering gives customers bare metal speed, with the control, security and consistent performance comparable to dedicated hardware. OnMetal Cloud Servers help increase efficiencies at scale, allowing customers to reduce the cost and complexity of their IT operations by consolidating workloads from many virtual environments to a few bare metal servers."

 "The demands of modern cloud architecture and workloads like Cassandra are pushing the industry to find performance anywhere it can," said Jonathan Ellis, co-founder at DataStax. "Running core infrastructure on hardware like Rackspace's OnMetal is the closest thing we have to an assured advantage: lower latency and more requests served with no changes to the code."

Rackspace claims that the bare metal servers feature improvements of 250 percent in write performance, 40 percent in read performance and include up to 800 GB of local boot drive storage capacity. Also, they feature RAID 1 mirrored storage with two hot-swappable disks.

You can learn more learn more about OnMetal Cloud Servers at https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal and the Rackspace Blog.