Dedicated bare metal performance in a secure, controlled virtual network.
You know what you get with bare metal servers on a classic infrastructure: dedicated compute with direct hardware access for your performance-oriented workloads. It’s compliant, controlled and secure.
But what about speed, high availability and interconnectivity? What about having a truer on-demand provisioning option for your most intense applications? Let’s look at two use cases that cannot be answered by previous Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) VPC solutions:
- Use case 1: The need for virtualization: Client one needs a way to create and manage their own virtual machines (VMs), but current virtual servers (VSIs) don’t allow for this. Their goal is to execute their own virtualization on servers completely free of a cloud-managed hypervisor.
- Use case 2: Performance-sensitive workloads: Client two works in the financial services industry and needs to maximize their application efficiency with consistently performing hardware while managing the concerns surrounding sensitive data. Their goal is to maintain intense compute and network performance while remaining compliant and in total control of their environment.
Bare metal servers at the speed of virtual
What do these two use clients have in common? A need to elevate traditional bare metal workloads with the speed and capabilities of a virtual cloud without sacrificing performance and security standards. Enter: IBM Cloud® Bare Metal Servers for VPC.
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC features at a glance
- 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8260 CPUs
- 10-minute rapid provisioning priced hourly
- User-managed virtualization, full VMware ESXi 7.0 support
- 100 Gbps uplinks with SmartNIC technology
- Security groups and network access control lists (ACLs)
- Create multiple private clouds in multizone regions (MZRs)
- Available in compute, balanced and memory profiles
- All NVMe-based secondary storage: 16x JBOD 3.2TB NVMe u.2 local options
- Enhanced networking functions supporting multi-FIP, VXLAN and no-NAT IP addressing
A single solution for multiple client needs
The market understands the importance of bare metal — high-performance, physical single tenancy and greater application customization compared to virtual servers. Bare metal servers address performance-sensitive workloads across the financial, insurance, retail and government industries. It is the backbone to common enterprise applications, including VMware, SAP and more.
To solve for performance in a scalable cloud, we’ve evolved our bare metal servers to be offered natively within our VPC. Let’s unpack this as it relates to the use cases above:
- Use case 1 solution: For our client who wants to manage virtualization without losing the strength of single tenancy performance from their bare metal server, Bare Metal Servers for VPC is an ideal choice. It comes without a KVM hypervisor installed, allowing the client to virtualize with the software of their choosing. At the same time, the client will have options for varying VMware-compatible configurations, including the most common fixed profiles found in Classic Infrastructure. Deployed with 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8260 Processors, this solution will help the client drive impact by protecting their data and application code from the data center to the edge, thereby giving them high network performance and interconnectivity. Unlike its VSI for VPC counterpart, this solution supports virtualization and is optimized for cloud enterprise applications, HPC workloads, IoT workloads and enhanced network and security.
- Use case 2 solution: This client has one of the most universal needs today — high performance for sensitive workloads. While virtual servers provide for the desired speed and elasticity, security, storage and consumption are better served with bare metal servers. Before, this client’s choices would have been a bare metal server on a classic infrastructure or to make compromises in moving to a VPC. Those choices do not adequately meet the needs for clients dealing with highly sensitive and regulated workloads, such as those in the financial services industry. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC provides 100% of the bare metal compute resource into a virtual network. The client benefits from dedicated physical core performance and security and maximum memory consumption on bare metal servers while solving for their speed and network concerns.
What does this mean for you? In your journey to cloud, VSIs can address most use cases. But when VSIs — either in a classic or VPC environment — cannot meet your requirements, you no longer need compromise.
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IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC gives you the benefits of bare metal with faster provisioning and better network design and performance. This solution takes the dedicated performance, single tenancy, consistency and security of a bare metal server and introduces more quality-of-life improvements. In addition to the compute, networking and storage advantages of a native VPC presence, IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC unlocks larger core and memory profiles, client-managed virtualization and an average of 4x faster network performance, all without the need for a gateway to connect classic and VPC infrastructures.