To recap where I began…
In the first part of this blog post, I provided an overview of how the notion of bare metal has evolved over the years – from on-premises to cloud, and from non-shared, single-tenant dedicated hardware consumed privately to a highly redundant, high-performance, flexible and multi-tenant capable hardware as a service shared in the public cloud.
It is hardly surprising that while the legacy view of dedicated “bare metal” is still around in an evolved form, now other iterations have spawned off (and thus confusion) such as Cloud IaaS and legacy dedicated hosts.
What can leave customers (and anyone for that matter) confused is the difference between Bare Metal and a dedicated host. And this sometimes leads to the terms being used interchangeably – and while they are extremely similar, they are not synonymous. It comes down to how they are offered by the provider.
Bare Metal
Bare metal is dedicated hardware that is only used by one customer and is offered as a whole unit to an organisation on a shorter-term subscription basis and typically comes without a base operating system requiring the renter to install one. It usually serves multiple users within the organisation and has more flexibility to scale up and down as the workload\seat count demands avoiding any lock-in commitments to pay above what you are consuming.
Dedicated Hosts
A dedicated host also has dedicated hardware offered as a whole, rented by one user typically for its own organisation’s use and rarely shared with other entities. One of the key characteristics of a dedicated host is that it can serve multiple users within the organisation but always remains dedicated entirely to the organisation that is renting it.
So just what is the difference between Bare Metal and Dedicated Hosts?
With both types of offerings, you can choose the base operating system, the applications you can install, and the security measures you impose within. Since you have administrator access (or root access), you get much more control over what happens.
So, while these are extremely similar, there is one key difference, and you might have picked it up in the previous descriptions – it comes down to how the providers offer it, and how they charge for it.
Dedicated hosts offer traditional payment plans to rent them, this longer-term arrangement contract allows you to set monthly or yearly contracts. One drawback here is if you only use the host for 50% of the time, you still need to pay for 100% of the contract.
On the other hand, bare-metal servers provide more flexible per-hour billing plans that give you the ability to pay for only what you use. Using this method, can provide better control of the costs directly and is ideal for workloads\applications that experience higher traffic or activity at certain times (peak times) and quiet at other times
Cloud IaaS
Arguably the most common Infrastructure based cloud computing offering in the market these days is IaaS or Infrastructure as a service. This originated around 15 years ago and is a model of shared resources (storage, networking, and computing) between many tenants. The renter does not get direct dedicated access to the hardware and is required to handle the environment’s applications, data, operating system, and security.
Management of the environment has complete control of the infrastructure through an application programming interface or dashboard., IaaS makes it easier to scale, upgrade, and add additional resources such as storage, without having to predict future consumption needs and pay for this upfront. AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are the biggest players when it comes to providers of IaaS, however, there is a long list of MSPs that also offer IaaS but on a much smaller scale but usually at a lower cost.
While you need to consider and adhere to rules that balance performance and scale, this makes this offering far less expensive than a dedicated or bare-metal offering which is a large benefit.
Benefits of Bare Metal
For the most part, Bare metal offerings are frequently seen as a much more developed, sensible, and evolved version of the legacy dedicated host offering with more benefits. These offerings are designed to host modern-day workloads and a costing model to complement them.
If we drill down into some of the more obvious benefits of a bare metal offering, most of the benefits are still shared with dedicated hosts.
Higher reliability
When using a bare metal or dedicated host, the users will experience better reliability, as it avoids the “noisy neighbour” impact, because the hardware is not being shared with any other tenant or organisation.
Dedicated performance
This also provides better performance as the processing power and resources are used and allocated by that single tenant. As you aren’t required to share resources, you can tune the physical server’s resources according to your business workloads so it can perform according to that workload’s requirements.
Higher level of security
By having your dedicated hardware, and complete control over the resources, access levels, and security policies – you can achieve higher levels of security on that host as you don’t have to consider impacting other tenants’ workloads when designing your security posture.
Pay only for what you use
Bare metal servers can be shutdown on demand, and spun up on demand too, allowing the user to only pay for what they use. If it isn’t being used, then there will be no associated charges as long as it is powered off. This flexibility allows organisations to handle peaks of usage much easier without worrying about unnecessary charges for unused resources. A key scenario where this would come in handy is annual financial reporting where an organisation needs to prepare a series of reports once a year over a week, so they can subscribe to a bare metal offering, load the relevant reporting software, and export the required reports before shutting the server down.
Summary
In closing, the era of cloud computing is an exciting time for organisations to utilise on-demand and cost-effective computer Infrastructure offerings. If we circle back to how we started this article exploring the legacy that is hardware sitting in an on-premises datacenter to now being able to tap into on-demand, utility-style cloud computing – available in many flavours.
Whether it is IaaS or a more dedicated offering such as Bare Metal you need for your requirements, there are many providers out there to choose from, and while each of these offerings and providers have its own pros and cons to consider, it is important to note that certainly, the most common benefit of all of these is not having to wait for shipping, racking and power as they are typically always immediately available.
And as always, regardless of what cloud-based offering you go for from the hyper-scalers, always ensure you have a robust and comprehensive data protection solution such as Vembu BDRSuite for the workloads you choose to place into the cloud as these don’t always have backup solutions built in.
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