When users rent computing resources from cloud services provider to achieve cloud computing, they have two options: Bare Metal Server (physical machine) or Virtual Server (virtual machine).
What is Bare Metal Server? In essence, Bare Metal Server can be seen as the upgrade version of physical server. It can be combined with other cloud services such as network services like Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and cloud database services, taking advantages of cloud resources by the interoperation with virtual server. Actually, parts of Bare Metal Servers are compatible with all sorts of Hypervisor platform. In other words, they support virtualization.
Why is it “bare”? Most of the Bare Metal Servers provided by cloud services provider mainly consist of CPU and internal storage. The relevant operation system and software should be configured by customers themselves.
But with the trend of cloudification, why the demand of physical server is still rising?
Although the virtualization is widely used nowadays, it still has difficulties to meet all the needs from users. There are two major deficiencies of virtualization: 1. The loss of capability With the introduction of the virtualization platforms, the process of calling hardware resources is not as smooth as in legacy computing.
Regarding some services required high capability (such as High Performance Computing), virtualization will lead to latency of services. In some cases, the same situation will happen if I/O (Input/Output) operation is frequent. 2. Impressionable user experience For example, Legacy computing can be seem as buying an isolated villa. You can dominate all the resources, while it is expensive and not flexible enough.
Cloud computing (Virtualization) is the same as renting house. There are multiple tenants in a building. Although each tenant has its own room, you will still be influenced by your neighbour. Thus the user experience can not be ensured when other tenants are overloaded by calling massive resources, even if the virtualization has promised the resources quota.
As for Bare Metal Server, cloud service providers enables you to become the only tenant by renting out a private physical server to you.
Above all, virtualization is not perfect enough to fully address the requirements of high standard.
This the reason why Bare Metal Server still remains active in the market.
The differences among ECS bare metal instance, physical machine and virtual machine, from Alibaba Cloud
What’ s the major customer of Bare Metal Server? 1. Banking, finance and stock alike industries Having high requirement of security, these industries will choose Bare Metal Server to ensure the isolation of data. 2. Aviation and universe observation alike high-computing industries These application scenarios needs high-capability system to support their massive data processing. 3. Game development Online game business requires high-capability system to ensure stable network services.
Generally speaking, the requirement of Bare Metal Server is constantly ascending. Its market scale has giant potential to develop. Contact us for more information!
