Many datacenter operators are increasingly relying on bare metal automation to speedup service delivery, eliminate human errors and delays and unlock new revenue streams.

​

Software Defined Bare Metal Infrastructure (SDBMI) is an emerging category of infrastructure that is aimed at optimizing IT resources and improving business agility. It enables companies to treat physical compute, storage and network as pools of resources that can be provisioned as needed.

​

Unlike Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), it operates with physical equipment rather than virtual equivalents which offers more performance and security as well as additional operational optimization benefits.

It solves the “last mile problem of automation”: Hardware break/fix/maintenance is flagged by 49% of infrastructure professional as the biggest pain point in a recent IDC study.

​

This problem is costing service providers an estimated $1,400,000 per year in man hours alone and an additional $700,000 per year in underutilized resources for every 5000 servers.

​

This novel approach also comes amid renewed interest in bare metal fueled by the increased use of containers, novel application architectures, NoSQL databases, real-time processing and others. 53 percent of organizations now use Docker and 48 percent use Kubernetes.

​