Cloud computing is a concept that’s really taken off in the past few years. It seems that’s all that people talk about these days: cloud storage, cloud security, etc. Well, get ready for yet another cloud on the horizon, and we’re not talking cumulus or nimbus here, people! Get ready for the bare metal cloud.

Sounding like the name of a heavy metal band, the bare metal cloud data solution takes advantage of what is known as a bare metal environment. Intrigued or confused yet? Read on and get brought up to speed in this new concept in service-based IT delivery.

This is a metal bear, with no cloud. Not precisely on topic.

The Bare Metal Environment

Put simply, a bare metal environment is a computer network or system where a virtual machine is installed directly on hardware instead of within the host operating system. Since a computer’s operating system is usually stored on a hard disk, the term “bare metal” was coined. The proper bare metal environment is important in determining what makes good bare metal cloud.

A bare metal environment helps to combat the problem of performance degradation, which can occur in standard cloud environments. Degradation is an issue on regular cloud networks due to the introduction of a hypervisor layer, which in turn is something which is supposed to enable the visibility, management capabilities, and flexibility needed to run multiple virtual machines off a single box. Unfortunately, the hypervisor layer creates additional processing overhead. In other words, the hypervisor solves one problem while creating another.

As a result, virtual machines end up competing and restricting I/O for workloads that are data intensive, which in turn produces an inconsistent, inefficient performance. Bare metal networks don’t have hypervisors, and thus gain at least a 20% boost in performance.

Sitting on a Bare Metal Cloud

Okay, so we know what a bare metal environment is; now we focus on the cloud aspect. The bare metal cloud replaces (or simply complements) the traditional virtualized cloud services with a dedicated server environment that nevertheless conforms to the normal cloud service model. In other words, the cloud benefits of efficiency, scalability, and flexibility remain intact, but with increased performance and response times.

The virtualized bare metal cloud runs on a fully dedicated server, which also includes storage. There is no hypervisor to eat away at performance, because switching is accomplished on physical networking equipment.

Who Should Use the Bare Metal Cloud?

Immediately right off the bat, Big Data applications can benefit greatly from bare metal cloud computing. You just knew that the ubiquitous Big Data would somehow factor into this, didn’t you? Any organizations that need to swiftly and efficiently perform short-term, data-intensive functions, things like render farms and media encoding, or must follow exacting compliance guidelines would be ideal candidates for using bare metal.

There Are Lots of Options Out There

Whether you choose to avoid the cloud (recent security problems in the news may cause some hesitance), go all in, choose a hybrid cloud, or go for the aforementioned bare metal cloud, it’s clear that there’s a solution out there for every organization or consumer. It’s just a matter of finding the right fit. But there’s good reason to believe that bare metal cloud computing may emerge as the clear choice in the coming years.