Bare Metal Server Use Cases

Bare Metal for Big Data, Hadoop & Analytics

Hadoop & Analytics

Hadoop and Analytics environments are complex to configure, deploy, and manage. Big data applications have a demand for performance while surges are often sporadic and unpredictable. In our experience, the volume of users and volume of data ingested grow at a faster rate than hardware can scale. This creates increased workload demands on existing infrastructure causing overall degradation of user experience and data processing. Many businesses begin by housing these applications on a virtual cloud platform, where they essentially outgrow it, through both performance needs and pricing.

Bare Metal Servers on Lumen Cloud specifically targets big data application workloads to provide your business to quickly expand your existing environment or for a hosted solution. They provide the ability to provision and manage physical machines fast via API or Control Portal. Design and grow your clusters to meet the exact demands of your data. Compute isolation and consistent performance are essential when mining demanding scenarios like recommendation engines, machine learning and fraud detection. With all local storage and more capacity than you can get on our VMs – up to 24TB on the configuration best suited for Big Data workloads – these dedicated servers provide your applications the response times your analysis demands.

Experience the advantages of the coupling of raw power needed for compute intensive jobs while allowing for customizable and on-demand flexibility with hourly-billing that Bare Metal Servers on Lumen Cloud unleashes.


Internal Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Containers Plus Bare Metal on Lumen Cloud

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) is evolving. Companies are beginning to move from heavy VM-based environments to a model where applications live in containers deployed on physical servers and provisioning occurs through an API. Containers will rule the cloud of the future and they will thrive on dedicated servers. Combining our Bare Metal Servers with Lumen Cloud will give you the operational advantage of a unified platform to operate your infrastructure at faster speeds, thus developing product faster and ultimately leading to efficiency.

The core benefit of a server isolation environment for developers is that they don’t have to take into account the plethora of uncertainties when they are writing code, unlike with multi-tenancy environments, where developers often need to equate the unknown variable of the host of other “noisy neighbors” in the virtual server environment. By migrating your container compute model to the server isolation haven of Bare Metal Servers on Lumen Cloud, you reap the benefits of faster deployment times and the ability to scale up as fast as your application’s traffic. It is also an excellent housing for micro service architectures. With our Bare Metal Servers, you will experience a more precise environment conducive to scaling your applications (particularly those running in containers like Docker), while continuing to enjoy the most popular benefits of a virtual cloud server – fast provisioning and on-demand self-service.


Enterprise Apps Not Well-suited to Virtualization

Enterprise Apps Not Well-Suited to Virtualization

Lumen Cloud Bare Metal Server technology brings an integrated user experience with single tenant environment to the cloud. These self-service dedicated servers can be an ideal home for enterprise applications that are either difficult to virtualize or that carry compute-intensive workloads, such as Oracle, SAP & Grid compute. Physical servers can often offer a cost saving opportunity vs VMs when dealing with software licensing constraints. This solution provides our customers more predictable performance for their applications to thrive combined with the ability to spin them up incredibly fast and provision them using the same management interface as their Lumen Cloud virtual servers.

Previously, the only way to gain complete physical isolation and single tenancy would have been to provision a dedicated server, either on-premises within an enterprise’s data center, or off-premises with a web hosting provider. While the latter would generally have been most expedient, it could easily take two-to-five days to deploy a physical server. And you’d be locked into a monthly contract, usually on at least a 2 year term. With Bare Metal cloud servers, you can be up and running in less than an hour, and pay on a true utility-basis, as you go, for only as long as you need that server.


Use Bare Metal for Application and Database Servers

Application & Database Servers

Customize your hybrid cloud solution through a unified management of resources by combining Lumen’s Bare Metal Servers with our elastic Cloud Servers up the stack to manage and scale three-tier applications. Multitier apps can have diverse requirements that Lumen Cloud can easily tackle by combining virtual machines with our Bare Metal Servers. Our customers can benefit from this hybrid cloud model by deploying the appropriate application tiers to the best suited form of infrastructure. The web tiers get the agility and elasticity of the virtual environment that they demand, while the application and database tiers requirements for performance and isolation are met on Lumen Cloud Bare Metal Servers.

Another way of benefiting from this hybrid approach is to start with an entirely virtual development environment. Then as you move to a test and production, you can migrate different workloads to physical servers. This puts the flexibility and cost effectiveness of the cloud to good use. So in the end you may keep your web tier on Cloud Servers, but deploy your applications and database on Bare Metal Servers.

Activate Your Edge Services Account in Minutes.