Extra! Extra! Bare-metal cloud is bridging the gap between virtualized IaaS cloud services and dedicated physical servers.

But don’t take our word for it.

Recently, our bare-metal cloud has received lots of attention in the news. Here are a few articles and reports that support our belief in the future of bare-metal cloud.

Scale and performance: The case for bare-metal in the cloud

Scalability, cost and operational efficiency are still driving companies toward the cloud, but the inherent multitenancy of cloud environments creates performance problems as workload volume increases. Arthur Cole of IT Business Edge says Internap’s Cloud Landscape Report survey clearly articulates the problem as “overhead in multi-tenant environments tends to rise to unacceptable levels as volumes rise, which makes the cloud a fickle partner at best when it comes to Big Data analytics and other key initiatives.”

Who would have thought it? Report talks up bare-metal cloud

Forbes contributor Ben Kepes has changed his tune a bit about bare-metal cloud. He initially dismissed the offering and said Internap was simply giving customers a “faster horse,” to borrow the quote from Henry Ford. Ben’s more recent article concedes that bare metal is a viable option for certain real-world use cases. The offering has many of the same features as a standard cloud solution, but without the overhead of virtualization, which many buyers still equate with cloud.

Frost & Sullivan recognizes Internap for bare-metal leadership

A recent Frost & Sullivan report on bare-metal clouds by Lynda Stadtmueller focuses on Internap as one of only two leading providers of the solution. The report is a great introduction to bare-metal cloud, and discusses the pros and cons of virtualization along with the increasing demand for bare metal as a “scalable, cost-efficient way to run high-performance workloads.” The price performance benefits of bare-metal cloud help big data apps achieve better performance and cost-at-scale.

Frost & Sullivan also honored Internap with the 2014 North American Cloud Services: Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership Award for best practices in the cloud services market. We appreciate the recognition, and are proud to be one of the few providers to offer this non-virtualized cloud solution.

For the performance and security sensitive user, the bare-metal cloud may be the solution

In the ZDNet blog, technology veteran David Chernicoff points out that performance and security concerns are still the main obstacles to cloud adoption, but bare-metal offerings may be able to address these pain points. Having a dedicated server that is not virtualized provides a higher degree of security than a multi-tenant environment.

Internap recognized for its bare-metal cloud leadership

The demand for big data solutions has increased as more organizations turn to consumer and market analytics for strategic insights. New applications are capable of turning vast amounts of data into meaningful information, but in order for these solutions to run effectively, they require more processing power than traditional public cloud offerings can provide. Bare-metal cloud helps bridge the gap between virtual and physical environments by offering the performance of a physical server with the flexibility and control of the cloud.

Hybrid infrastructure continues to gain popularity as more businesses require increased flexibility and performance for data-intensive applications. The ability to connect unique environments, such as cloud or dedicated servers, allows IT organizations and developers to meet the demands of large-scale deployments in a cost-effective manner.

To achieve the flexibility and performance benefits of hybrid infrastructure, many organizations choose to build their infrastructure with a variety of services from multiple vendors. Over time, the combination of disparate solutions can become exceedingly difficult to manage. Without the ability to logically provision and monitor machines, the risk of operational inefficiencies rises, and managing a patchwork of different solutions becomes overly complex and inhibits scalability.

Creating a best-fit hybrid infrastructure

Hybridized hosting environments offer significant benefits, enabling businesses to leverage the best solution for their needs. For example, public cloud provides on-demand provisioning of cloud servers with no upfront capital commitments, allowing users to scale capacity up and down in response to changes in demand. However, physical servers dedicated to the application in hosting environments often deliver better performance for data-intensive applications. Additionally, security-sensitive workloads are frequently hosted within a colocation facility where servers, storage and networking can be precisely customized to deliver maximum security and application efficiency.

By connecting physical environments that reside in colocation or hosting venues with cloud, companies can fully leverage legacy IT investments while improving the performance, security, and cost efficiency of hosted applications.

Beyond the cloud

While the term “hybrid” is commonly used to describe a mix of different cloud deployment models, it has expanded to include different infrastructure environments as well. But the lack of a universally accepted definition of hybridization makes it difficult for companies to accurately evaluate the many “hybrid” solutions available from service providers today.

Hybridization defined

Ultimately, hybridization is about finding the right mix of infrastructure environments to meet your application needs. Our white paper, Deciphering Hybrid Infrastructure, suggests an expanded definition of hybridization and addresses some common misinterpretations of the term. By connecting physical environments that reside in colocation or hosting venues with cloud, companies can fully leverage legacy IT investments while improving the performance, security, and cost efficiency of hosted applications.

Learn more about the benefits of hybrid hosting environments and capabilities of complete hybrid solutions in the white paper, Deciphering Hybrid Infrastructure – Identifying the elements of a comprehensive hybrid solution.

From our founding in 1996, Internap’s mission has always been to make the Internet perform at its maximum level. The tools to accomplish this have changed drastically over the decades and the ways we use the Internet in our daily lives even more so, but our obsession with unlocking the Internet’s full potential has never wavered. The launch of the new Internap.com gives us an opportunity to reaffirm this mission and, we hope, better communicate it to the world.

Applications thrive here
Day after day, we are inspired by our customers, who are creating a new generation of Internet applications that have fundamentally changed the way we live, work and play. There’s no margin for error here – your applications require an Internet infrastructure that’s flexible, scalable and always on. One that is more than just virtual or physical, managed or unmanaged. That is both local and global, supported by people passionate about enabling your success.

This is where we come in. Internap helps our customers achieve amazing application performance through our hybrid infrastructure, global network of data centers and patented technology.

It all starts with your vision for your application. However you’re trying to impact the world, we’ll support you with a hybrid infrastructure that meets your needs today and grows with you tomorrow. We’ll work with you to create just the right combination of public or private cloud, managed hosting, and colocation to make sure you never have to look back.

The Internet grows in complexity daily, as does your need to seamlessly reach customers around the globe. Our state-of-the-art data centers are at the heart of everything we do, and we’ve strategically located them around the globe in the places you need them most – closer to your end users. We design, engineer and operate them ourselves for maximum reliability, flexibility and efficiency.

Add to this foundation our intelligent Managed Internet Route Optimizer^™ (MIRO), which continuously identifies and routes your application traffic over the best-performing network path, and the result is powerful, consistent performance that’s two to three times faster than other Internet carriers. Paired with our global CDN, nothing minimizes latency better for your data-intensive applications.

We know that your business is 24/7 and so is ours; when you do need support, our certified support engineers will begin solving even the toughest infrastructure problems immediately, with fast resolution and your complete satisfaction as our goal.

Every day, we strive to enable our clients to do great things and deliver amazing applications. Where the exceptional becomes the everyday. New ways of thinking become better ways of doing. And success, like your business itself, happens fast.

So go be brilliant. We’ll be right here to help.

What if You Had a More Powerful Internet Infrastructure?