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All major cloud vendors offer bare-metal options, but most have come late to the market and their enthusiasm around bare-metal computing has been muted.
A specialty bare-metal cloud provider can save customers between 45% and 80% off the price of comparable offerings from the three largest public cloud companies.
There are good reasons for that. Cloud vendors specialize in operating highly automated hardware environments with high utilization rates enabled by virtual machines. They endeavor to make the underlying infrastructure as invisible to their customers as possible, which also gives them the flexibility to shift workloads between data centers and regions as they need to balance capacity.
Hosting dedicated hardware in data centers is neither an area of expertise for public cloud providers nor a compatible business model. For these and other reasons, licensing bare-metal computing from a major hyperscale cloud provider can cost significantly more than working with a vendor that specializes in bare-metal computing. One analysis conducted by phoenixNAP found a specialty bare-metal cloud provider can save customers between 45% and 80% off the price of comparable offerings from the three largest public cloud companies.
What to look for in a bare-metal computing provider
Given the growth statistics cited earlier, it isn’t surprising that many service providers now offer bare-metal options. The expertise needed to operate bare-metal and multitenant cloud environments differs in some fundamental ways, however. Look for a company that can demonstrate that bare-metal computing is a core competency, not an afterthought. Inquire about the company’s history, customer base, and the variety of workloads it has managed. Check customer references and ask for examples of how the provider supported individual customer needs.
