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Sponsored With the progress of clouds, organizing IT infrastructure is no harder than organizing pizza delivery.

According to MarketsandMarkets, by the end of 2021, cloud data centers will process over 94% of the total workload. Its easy to explain why businesses migrate to clouds: companies like how simple it is to rent capacities and solutions from providers. However, all that is more relevant to virtual machines.

The situation around dedicated servers is not as simple. They are, however, still indispensable for certain tasks, and allow clients business to get the most out of its infrastructure. Our review of bare metal servers will show their advantages, when they are indispensable and how to seamlessly integrate them into corporate IT infrastructure.

Clouds with bare metal servers and virtual machines have a lot in common:

However, bare metal servers have a host of advantages over virtual machines.

When renting a bare metal server, the user gets full control over the isolated equipment. In the single-user environment, the client has root access to the server. They use the CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources on their own, which ensures maximum productivity under peak load. Virtual machines are different: many machines may be launched within one server, and the user cannot directly control the overall load of the server.

Virtual machines are not as predictable. Their productivity can change when they are transferred between servers, which may also lead to extra expenses. Bare metal servers are more stable because they cannot be transferred or tampered with unless the user requests or authorizes it. Their productivity is higher and more predictable: bare metal servers dont use virtualization and computational resources are distributed between the clients apps.

Virtual machine users dont know the state of the equipment the provider gives them. It might be cheap and outdated, and the load on the hosts infrastructure might be too big because of overselling. With bare metal servers, such problems cannot occur. The client has direct access to hardware, fully controlling the environment, and theyre able to check the equipment and details at any point.

It might seem that launching a virtual machine within an operating system ensures extra safety. However, its the other way around: the operating system on which the virtual machine works might also be vulnerable to hacking, exploits, or viruses. If something happens to the OS, it will also affect the safety of the virtual environment. Bare metal server users have direct access to the infrastructure, which means they have everything it takes to prevent any safety issues proactively, especially since bare metal servers also support extra protection measures provided by vendors.

Cloud provider clients dont always realize that bare metal servers are more economical than virtual machines. At first glance, bare metal servers seem more expensive than virtual hosting, but their benefits are usually more obvious in the longer term. This is due to the fixed service costs. Unlike virtual machines, a private server has a maximum bandwidth limit, so clients dont have to worry about possible overspending and extra expenses. As a result, cloud resources on bare metal servers oftentimes turn out to be cheaper than renting the same computing capacities, with the same cores, memory, and storage, within virtual hosting.

There are a lot of tasks for which bare metal servers are a better fit than virtual ones. Here are some of them:

However, no matter how much better bare metal servers are suited for many tasks, its not always right to put them up against virtual machines. Its often more efficient and profitable to use both solutions within a joint IT infrastructure, especially since its easy to do with cloud services.

G-Core Labs new offering, Bare-Metal-as-a-Service, allows businesses to deploy bare metal nodes in the cloud within minutes. It combines the high capacity of traditional dedicated servers with the simplicity of working with virtual machines under the IaaS model.

In combination with the providers other solutions, the new server gives the public cloud users a ready-to-use, flexible infrastructure, which allows the simultaneous management of dedicated servers and virtual machines, public and private networks, as well as other cloud products. It allows clients to both efficiently and economically use resources and gives them additional scenarios of infrastructure utilization. For example, in a public cloud, a customer may run production environments on bare metal servers, deploying extra virtual machines within minutes when the load peaks. This extra capacity will be easy to then delete.

The combined solution ensures global scalability, high safety, and reliability of cloud infrastructure, allowing businesses to exploit the advantages of both virtual machines and bare metal services. Its convenient because the first ones are suitable for one kind of task, like apps with short-time load peaks, and the second ones are perfect for other situations, including the operation of productivity-sensitive apps.

Sponsored by G-Core Labs

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Get a dedicated server in five minutes - The Register