In a radical departure from traditionally accepted concept of sharing that is so prevalent in cloud environments these days, Rackspace announced the launch of dedicated single-tenant OnMetal Cloud Servers on the Infrastructure as a Service model. This service is squarely targeted at enterprises desirous of having a dedicated system for their cloud based operations. OnMetal services can be ramped up or down as required with access available through an API. Services are charged by the minute.
Taylor Rhodes, president of Rackspace announced this launch at Gigaom Structure 2014 and went on to state that this exclusivity of use brings the benefit of consistent performance, predictable costs and the facility of scaling. OnMetal is powered by OpenStack and is available in three different configurations based on memory, I/O and computing power. Users can tailor either of these for large scale web apps. Currently OnMetal has limited availability and should pick up speed by July, with operations located in Rackspace’s Northem Virginia data center.
Sharing brings complexity and reduces speed of implementation. OnMetal single tenant provisions instantly and is easy to manage. It integrates with existing cloud architecture and has flexibility to permit interfacing with multi-tenant cloud servers. Rackspace uses the best quality enterprise grade components and high performance networking in the form of two 10 Gb/s network connections. For now OnMetal brings the best of collocation with dedicated single tenant serve and cloud agility in one unified solution.
