Rackspace Unveils Second-Gen Bare Metal Cloud Server Based on Open Compute

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By The WHIR

Rackspace has updated its OnMetal Cloud Server line this week to deliver enhanced connectivity and performance to customers with intensive data processing, compute power, and quick scaling and deployment needs. OnMetal v2 went into general availability Thursday, the company announced.

The next generation of OnMetal servers are still bare-metal, single-tenant, and API provisioned in minutes. They run Microsoft and Linux workloads with OpenStack-powered public cloud flexibility and bare metal speed and security, Rackspace said.

Built on second generation Open Compute servers with Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors, OnMetal v2 Cloud Servers now integrate with Cloud Networks, and are slated to integrate with RackConnect 3.0 in the second quarter, to improve networking security. They now offer international availability with decreased latency, and regional coverage in the US and UK. They are also 250 percent faster writing and 40 percent faster in reading, and top out at 800 GB of local boot drive storage. RAID 1 mirrored storage with two hot-swappable discs help improve uptime and reduce the risk of data loss.

Read more: Rackspace Intros Dedicated Servers That Behave Just Like Cloud VMs

“The demands of modern cloud architecture and workloads like Cassandra are pushing the industry to find performance anywhere it can,” Jonathan Ellis, co-founder at DataStax said in a statement. “Running core infrastructure on hardware like Rackspace’s OnMetal is the closest thing we have to an assured advantage: lower latency and more requests served with no changes to the code.”

Rackspace has also added to the selection of guest images, and will add Windows support will become available in the second quarter of 2016.

Political social networking app Brigade reports that using first-generation OnMetal Cloud Servers improved its query times by 36.5 times, from 7.3 seconds to 0.2 seconds.

Rackspace has been shifting employees from its public cloud department to its private and hybrid cloud computing departments as the pace of new signups slows. The company is pursuing the private OpenStack cloud market, however, through a new partnership with Red Hat.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/rackspace-onmetal-cloud-server-updates-target-performance-security