Rackspace launches Bare Metal as a Service

As organisations large and small move away from investing scarce capital into building and maintaining their own data centers, Rackspace delivers a wide range of options to aid their long-term strategic plans. An expanded bare metal portfolio plays an important role in modernising IT by enabling a broad class of applications to migrate unchanged out of customer data centers minimising disruption, cost and risk.

Controlling the risk around app-migration is extremely important when moving data intensive and mission critical applications off-premises. Bare Metal as a Service enables a simpler “lift and shift” out of the data center by reducing the need to refactor legacy applications and providing the increased hardware access and custom OS options enterprises require. With Rackspace bare metal infrastructure, customers can use the same physical load balancing and network security platforms they leverage on-premises reducing change to deployment architecture and operations processes.

Bare Metal as a Service delivers important innovations to the Rackspace Managed Hosting platform such as:

• Pay-as-you-go pricing: Customers pay for what they use in an on-demand consumption model for infrastructure. This feature enables Rackspace Managed Hosting customers to more closely align resources to growth and handle burst capacity and traffic spikes without the need to pay for additional fixed capacity.  
• On-demand provisioning and API access: For increased agility around compute and storage, Rackspace BMaaS provides customers with on-demand provisioning options to easily scale infrastructure up and down as needed. BMaaS can be accessed both via the Rackspace portal and API.  A wide range of APIs are available with BMaaS to enable the automation of infrastructure purchase, consumption and management.
• Raw Performance: Rackspace’s bare metal infrastructure is optimised for various workloads spanning from containers and microservices to I/O intensive databases and parallel computing that leverage the latest generation of NVMe storage and GPU. BMaaS coupled with high throughput networking ensures customers can utilise the full power of compute and local and external storage to build out robust, scalable private cloud environments or expand existing Managed Hosting environments with greater flexibility.
• Enterprise-grade Security and Reliability: With physically isolated bare metal, there is no sharing of infrastructure, eliminating the impact of “noisy neighbors” on performance. For enhanced security, Rackspace Managed Security (RMS) is available with BMaaS deployments to provide monitoring and detection services as well as around-the-clock response and remediation.  

 “Rackspace is expanding its leadership position by giving customers more choice of technology that best fits their infrastructure and application needs,” said Henry Tran, General Manager of Managed Hosting at Rackspace. “Due to predictability of performance, there are workloads best-fit to run in Managed Hosting’s physically isolated single-tenant environment. Bare Metal as a Service brings much needed flexibility to Managed Hosting such as on-demand provisioning and utility pricing while retaining its strongest features: predictable performance and reliability. Our customers now have the best of both worlds as they seek to modernise their IT.”