Rackspace unveils OnMetal cloud servers that aren't made for sharing
More from Structure 2014
The concept of the sharing economy is bubbling over in popularity in the tech world these days, but maybe not every piece of technology is made for this movement.
Introduced by company president Taylor Rhodes at Gigaom Structure 2014 on Thursday, Rackspace launched OnMetal Cloud Servers, a single-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service for elastic computing and scaling application productions.
OnMetal servers were designed to be spun up or down as quickly as virtual machines, aiming to serve businesses wanting more dedicated systems for cloud-based systems.
Also like virtual machines, OnMetal Cloud Servers are accessed through an API and charged on a pay-by-the-minute model.
Rhodes explained further in a blog post on Thursday about the significance of not having to share metal and the related pain points of the public cloud:
The cloud users we talk with believe, as we do, that virtualization and sharing a physical machine are fantastic tools when you’re starting out, or if you stay relatively small. But those users say that once they start to get big and their traffic rises, colocation becomes more attractive for its simplicity of scaling, consistent performance, and predictable cost.
Powered by OpenStack, OnMetal is available from one of three configurations, each of which can be tailored to the customer's large web scale apps based on compute, memory, and I/O needs.
OnMetal Cloud Servers are launching slowly, initially for testing in limited availability.
Rackspace projected general availability will follow in July, based from its Northern Virginia datacenter for North America. Support is promised to be extended to Rackspace’s international datacenters in 2015.