MetalSoft’s bare metal automation platform offers distinct operational features and licensing approaches over other bare metal tools or platforms. First, it was purpose-built to be the software platform for automating the bare metal infrastructure of a Big Data cloud service provider (CSP) in EMEA and has been in production for over 7 years. In 2020, the software and development team were spun out into a separate company, MetalSoft, to continue to advance its capabilities and to offer them to other operators seeking to automate their bare metal infrastructure, including CSPs, private cloud providers, telcos, and SaaS providers.
Second, a holistic approach to datacenter-level bare metal automation was undertaken by MetalSoft. This means that all bare metal infrastructure (servers, storage, and network switches) can be provisioned, deployed, and operated with a high level of automation to deliver a cloud-like, on-demand experience to users. A scalable controller/software agent hierarchy allows scaling across multiple datacenters and out to the edges of the internet. Integrated billing/metering features allow for reseller or departmental-level tiering of services. A workflow-based, declarative architecture assists operators in overall life cycle management of their infrastructure, including avoiding problems associated with configuration drift, inventory management, and handling tasks such as data wiping between users and firmware/software upgrades. The ability to provision dedicated server clusters, natively configured L2 networks, and SAN volumes for each tenant or user offers improved noisy neighbor and security isolation.
Third, MetalSoft is committed to delivering this advanced orchestration platform to other CSP operators, enterprises, and SaaS providers while focusing on expanding its interoperability matrix of supported hardware and simplifying integrations with application platforms such as VMware and Kubernetes. Operators can either license and host the entire software platform themselves or have MetalSoft deploy SW agents into the operator’s data center, and host/operate the controllers themselves, while having the operators and their users benefit from the cloudifying their own infrastructure. This can be done on a build, operate, transfer basis if desired. SaaS providers may want to integrate and embed this capability into their own service automation stacks. As seen from my other blog, The Business Case for Cloud Service Providers to deploy MetalSoft, significant ROI and TCO cost reductions can be achieved.