Internap Expands Bare-Metal Cloud Servers to London, Hong Kong Data Centers

Data center service provider Internap has expanded its bare-metal public cloud service to data centers in London and Hong Kong. The service was previously available at the company’s Amsterdam, Singapore, Dallas, New York and Santa Clara, California, locations.

Bare-metal cloud servers are essentially dedicated servers customers can provision like they provision cloud virtual machines. The offering, also available from Internap rivals like Rackspace and IBM SoftLayer, provides performance of dedicated servers along with elasticity of a public cloud service.

Internap said it was addressing demand by companies running globally distributed data-intensive applications, such as Big Data analytics, mobile and digital advertising and online gaming. Such applications can suffer from performance issues when sharing physical resources with other applications.

The provider’s bare-metal cloud offering, called AgileCloud, is coupled with its patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer technology, which continuously analyses Internet performance and routes customer traffic over the best available path.

“Organizations deploying real-time, data-intensive applications are increasingly seeking cloud services that provide flawless performance, reliability and cost efficiency across globally distributed environments,” said Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and hosting at Internap. “Our bare-metal cloud uniquely addresses these demands, and the addition of our London and Hong Kong locations delivers broader reach in key end user markets.”

Internap’s competitors in the space have been very active.

IBM announced earlier this year that it would invest $1.2 billion in expanding physical footprint of the SoftLayer cloud. Earlier this week the company announced the most recent addition to that footprint: a new data center in London.

Rackspace in June rolled out a brand new bare-metal cloud offering, called OnMetal. The company has custom-built servers to support the offering using Open Compute designs as a basis.