Rackspace launches OnMetal Cloud Servers

Rackspace® Hosting has announced OnMetal Cloud Servers -- an API-driven, single-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering designed for customers with rapidly growing infrastructure footprints who seek the agility and elasticity of cloud along with the simplicity and performance of colocation.

“The rising complexity of the multi-tenant cloud affects applications in a variety of ways,” said Taylor Rhodes, president of Rackspace. “Virtualisation and sharing a physical machine are fantastic tools for specific workloads at certain scale; however, we’ve learned that the one-size-fits-all approach to multi-tenancy just doesn’t work once you become successful, so we created OnMetal to simplify scaling for customers to stay lean and fast with a laser-sharp focus on building out their product.”

Noisy neighbours in multi-tenant environments can degrade network latency, disk I/O and compute processing power, which can create unpredictable application performance. Rackspace is tapping into its expertise in scaling applications to offer a solution that helps to eliminate the pain points typically associated with the current, predominant model.

“What’s exciting about bare metal with an API is that you get all the benefits of cloud infrastructures, such as full automation and writing software to manage your servers, but without any of the compromises on performance or reliability,” said Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS. “Running CoreOS on OnMetal Cloud Servers, you get a host operating system that is optimised for efficiency and ready to run your container-based applications from first boot.”

OnMetal Cloud Servers are built with Open Compute Project spec’d hardware and powered by OpenStack®. The servers come in three different sets of specifications, each custom designed and built for workloads commonly associated with large web scale applications:
· Compute-optimised configuration - 20 threads and 32GB RAM; can be used to power large-scale web servers, application servers, queue processors and load balancers.
· Memory-optimised configuration - 24 threads and 512GB RAM; can be used to power caches, search indexes and in-memory analytics.
· I/O-optimised configuration - 40 threads, 128GB RAM, 3.2TB PCIe flash drive that can be used to power large NoSQL data stores, traditional SQL databases and OLTP applications.
Customers also rely on Fanatical Support® to manage the complexity of running their infrastructure on their behalf. By default, every OnMetal Cloud Servers customer gets access to specialists at Rackspace to optimise their application architecture, assist with code debugging and monitor their infrastructure.

“We’ve all been trained to think of the cloud as generic virtual machines on demand. VMs have had their decade. The future ‘Cloud’ will be built with containers deployed across bare-metal servers provisioned via API,” said Zack Rosen, CEO of Pantheon. “We believe Rackspace’s OnMetal service is the future of Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It’s simply more efficient -- you get the performance and cost-efficiency of single-tenant servers and agility with containers that blows away what you can do with VMs.”