IaaS platforms and virtual private clouds have historically been built on top of virtualization platforms. The virtualization platforms are designed to abstract servers, storage, and networking from the underlying hardware to provide security isolation, improved utilization (bin-packing), agility, and elasticity of consumption. Upwards of 80% of enterprise applications run in virtualized environments, with the remainder running on dedicated hardware (bare metal).
However, because of the increasing adoption of HPC, Big Data, NoSQL, AI, and container use cases, many applications have shifted to consuming entire clusters or racks of servers, switches, and storage. Some require specialized acceleration hardware or GPUs. Other applications must necessarily run in light-weight compute platforms situated on the edge of the network where virtualization is not possible or not necessary. These trends, among others, have created renewed interest in running workloads on bare metal clouds.
MetalSoft offers the most comprehensive bare metal cloud automation platform in the industry for enabling cloud service providers (CSPs) and private cloud operators to address these new types of workloads while continuing to support virtualized and legacy applications running on dedicated hardware. MetalSoft does so by enabling self-service functionality and by automating provisioning, equipment enrollment, inventory management, networking configuration, firmware upgrades, etc. and by offering failure prevention through built-in automated monitoring and fault detection.
MetalSoft has modeled the ROI for CSPs based on its own operational experience and identified savings resulting from higher data center staff productivity, improved hardware utilization, lower turnaround time, and higher SLA compliance. With these operational cost savings, using the MetalSoft bare metal automation platform can pay for itself within 6 months. If on-demand Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS) is also offered, the total ROI can increase to over 6X by the 2nd year of operation. CSPs who are interested in the details of this model can fill out our inquiry form to receive our ROI analysis calculator.
A key final point for CSPs to note is that MetalSoft’s focus is on building and delivering the best-of-breed bare metal cloud automation platform; it will not compete with CSP’s. Instead, MetalSoft intends to partner and deliver even more software features for heterogeneous hardware support, higher integration with applications, greater support for edge use cases, and greater levels of automation through use of machine learning.