78 Understanding Bare Metal Servers & Their Use Cases
As the landscape of cloud and hosting grows and expands, businesses can choose anything from shared or virtual to dedicated servers. However, the bare metal server offers unmatched power and customization for hosting in today’s world. This article explains the benefits of using a bare metal server and what types of businesses typically employ them. We also explore bare metal provisioning necessary to operate such a powerful server.
What is a Bare Metal Server?
A bare metal server is a physical, single-tenant server. Essentially, this server is exclusively reserved for one customer and one customer only—as opposed to virtualized settings where multiple users are sharing computing power. Thus, a bare metal server provides all processing, RAM, and storage to one user’s needs.
What are the Advantages of Bare Metal Servers?
The advantages are improved performance, enhanced security, and the option to configure the server to precise requirements. A bare metal server functions without a hypervisor, unlike virtual machines (VMs).
As a result, a bare metal server is ideal for any application that requires high performance, low latency, and dedicated resource availability.
Bare metal servers have optimal computing performance and efficiency since there’s no virtualization overhead. When it comes to configuration & control, the physical components and virtual components of the server can be configured to company needs.
Automation options available today make it easy to scale and deploy bare metal servers. For certain workloads that require sustained processing 24/7, bare metal servers offer more bang for the buck despite being more expensive initially than operating a virtual server.
Common Use Cases for Bare Metal Servers
Bare metal servers are utilized in various industries and for a variety of applications requiring intensive, reliable, and secure processing. Here are some common use cases:
1. High Performance Computing (HPC) – Industries like scientific research, weather forecasting, and trading rely on extensive calculations to function properly. Bare metal servers provide the required compute resources to facilitate extensive calculations, analytics, and predictions.
2. AI & Machine Learning – AI and machine learning workloads need massive processing power—GPUs, extensive memory needs, etc. With bare metal servers, companies can ensure their AI projects are tailored without the limitations and lag times of virtualization.
3. Big Data & Analytics – Organizations can efficiently execute enterprise-level data analytics on bare metal servers. Operating on massive data sets needing near real-time data processing, the processing requires high disk I/O and low latency.
4. Gaming Servers – Whether you’re playing online or multiplayer, gaming requires low latency, high uptime, and powerful processing. Bare metal servers offer the best in gaming since they reduce lag and offer dedicated processing for simultaneous gaming with a multitude of other players.
5. Financial Services & Trading – Stock trading platforms, cryptocurrency exchanges, and any financial operation that needs ultra-low latency for every transaction benefit more from bare metal servers because of their instant processing of data with the lowest latency possible.
6. Enterprise-level software applications, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and all things SAP require significant processing power. Bare metal servers ensure that these powerful enterprise applications operate effectively and efficiently—as they require the uptime, reliability, and failover these solutions offer.
7. Streaming & Content Delivery – Should your business be in the media—video streaming, video on demand, CDNs—your need is for high bandwidth and consistent performance to prevent buffering and other interruptions while customers consume your content. Therefore, the bare metal solution fulfills this requirement.
Bare Metal Provisioning
What is Bare Metal Provisioning?
Bare Metal Provisioning is the process where you setup an operating system, software, and configurations on a bare metal machine. A virtual machine (VM), for instance, can be templated, deployment cloned, or replicated and installed, whereas bare metal provisioning is about direct installation on a physical server.
Steps Involved in Bare Metal Provisioning
1. Machine Configuration: The machine is booted with required CPU, RAM, storage, and networking
2. BIOS/Firmware Configuration: The BIOS/UEFI is adjusted for performance and security.
3. OS Installation: The operating system (Linux, Windows, custom version) is installed through silent or attended installations.
4. Driver/Software Installation: Necessary enterprise drivers are installed, and enterprise applications are installed for functionality.
5. Networking Installation: The networking IP, DNS, and other configurations are set.
6. Security Hardening: The application server is locked down with everything imaginable, from firewalls to encryption.
7. Testing and Validation: The application server is assessed once installed to ensure it works correctly prior to going live in production.
Tools for Bare Metal Provisioning
Bare metal provisioning tools enable IT to streamline the deployment of operating systems and applications onto physical servers that aren’t running software environments already. They help prepare for subsequent mass deployments by assuming control over network booting to disk imaging configurations. The leaders in bare metal environment deployment and provisioning competition include PXE, Redfish, MAAS (Metal as a Service), and Foreman. Bare metal provisioning benefits cloud providers, data centers, and enterprise IT. Bare metal provisioning eliminates the manual provisioning process—meaning you gain greater efficiencies, fewer mistakes, and consistency across deployments.
The Take Home…
Bare metal servers offer the best in performance, security, and customization for companies requiring dedicated processing capabilities. From companies running AI and big data analytical solutions to gaming applications to financial markets, these servers come with the uptime and operational efficiencies to support even the most complex operations. Furthermore, bare metal solutions give companies a greater sense of control with access to their provisioning tools, facilitating the ease of deployment and management of such an infrastructure. Thus, as technology expands and subsequently evolves even further, bare metal solutions are considered to be one of the top choices for companies who need more control