By 2026, 40% of total revenue will be generated by digital products, services, and experiences for G2000 organizations,1 a clear sign that organizations are continuing to invest in the modernization of their digital infrastructure with the goal of creating better business outcomes with a faster time to market.
However, it’s important to understand the capabilities and limitations of your infrastructure options when considering the best deployment model for the desired transformation results.
Bare Metal: A physical server dedicated to a single client/tenant used in colocation facilities, allowing for direct access to the hardware for maximum performance and control. Ideal for high-performance computing workloads or those with high outbound bandwidth usage.
Virtual Machine: A software emulation of a physical computer that can run concurrently on a single physical server (host machine) that uses its allocation of shared host machine resources—CPU, memory, and storage—to run its own operating system and applications.
There are several factors to consider when choosing the best deployment model for your systems and applications:
- Performance requirements: compute power, memory, storage, and network performance
- Security considerations: industry standards, compliance requirements, system isolation, encryption model
- Scalability needs: fluctuations in demand, scaling up (add resources), scaling out (add servers), costs to scale (including resources, and admin)
- Resource management: monitoring and managing usage and waste for CPU, memory, storage, and network bandwidth (automated/dynamic or manual)
- Workload governance: level of customizable visibility, control, and oversight for the system and data
- Lifecycle sustainability: ease of updating and maintaining systems over time
Comparing scenarios
Let’s make a feature-by-feature comparison of bare metal versus virtual machines.
| Feature | Bare Metal | Virtual Machine |
| Tenancy | Single tenant, free of noisy neighbors | Often multi-tenant with multiple VMs on a single server |
| Security | Supports custom security software to protect infrastructure and data | Multi-tenant model with no control over host machine increases security risk |
| Performance | Dedicated hardware for ultimate performance | Shared hardware with potential resource competition from other VMs and the hypervisor |
| Customization | Flexible and upgradeable | Configurable, but not customizable |
| Scalability | Requires time to make changes | Near instant scale |
| Pricing | Predictable costs | Varies with resource usage |
| Maintenance | May be included by provider | Managed by provider |
A colocation provider can help to address greater visibility, governance, and control compared to the public cloud while still delivering a cloud-like experience by providing:
- Bare metal servers
- Private cloud compute
- Data center space (if required)
- Interconnection to cloud and networking services
Choosing bare metal servers for high-performance workloads
It’s important to choose the right deployment model based on individual project requirements and the attributes that matter most for your business operations.
If you require a high-performance, secure, controlled environment, then a bare metal server is likely your best option. Evocative Metal can be deployed with the operating system of your choice at data centers located in major metros around the world at an affordable price that won’t severely impact your bottom line.
Evocative Metal seamlessly integrates with your existing IT environment and gives you:
- Complete hardware control
- No noisy neighbors
- Geographically redundant infrastructure
- Real-time security and compliance
- 24/7/365 support
To learn more about how Evocative can help you go to market faster while achieving cost predictability, improving performance, and gaining greater security for your infrastructure, we invite you to register for a whiteboard session.