What is Bare Metal Server?

Have you ever seen that picture of the first general-use computer? ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was built during WW2 and took up a whole room just to account for hardware alone. From housing a single computer to acres of land dedicated to housing bare metal servers, we’ve come a long way in expanding our computer power. But what is bare metal server?

A bare metal server refers to a physical server used by a single tenant that can be rented out, typically as a cloud service. “Bare” refers to a lack of additional layers often added by cloud providers to enhance management experience, bypassing layers like hypervisors and operating systems. The result of working with a bare metal server is an infrastructure experience completely under user control, which, much like your computer’s hardware, is completely customizable.

In a cloud-dominated world, infrastructure options like containers and virtual machines (VMs) have become go-to options for many organizations based on sheer convenience. Although these two options can directly integrate into huge cloud networks, bare metal servers are extremely viable even today, bypassing excessive taxes and even rendering the noisy neighbor effect futile.

With a projected CAGR of 23.9% from 2024 to 2030, the bare metal server market, specifically bare metal cloud, shows no signs of slowing down despite strong alternatives. Bare metal is going nowhere, what does the physical, dedicated hardware entail for its users?

Why Use a Bare Metal Dedicated Server?

Bare metal servers allow organizations to fine tune their infrastructure and physical hardware loadout, customizing as necessity rises. Here are just a few of the bare metal server benefits: 

Enhanced Security

Have you heard of the noisy neighbor effect? Much like a neighbor always looking to intrude on your business, the noisy neighbor effect is a common occurrence in multi-tenant operations. This sees one tenant taking compute bandwidth, resources, and other capabilities from another tenant, causing uneven performance. While the neighbor receives exceptional performance, the other tenant begins underperforming and causing network-wide issues

Having a dedicated bare metal server solves this issue, providing complete infrastructure privacy for all of your systems. Workload segmentation all creates a stronger degree of fault tolerance, ensuring that your systems are up for longer. 

Outside of solving multi tenant issues, bare metal offers a unique approach to security by offering traditional hardware security measures that can be upgraded. Because of your unique access to the hardware your systems are built upon, you have granular control over firewalling and other defense mechanisms that you see fit to add.

Greater Infrastructure Customizability and Performance

As the name suggests, bare metal servers are bare: blank slates tailored towards your unique business needs. 

Whether your application needs a stronger degree of security than normal, or you have a preferred operating system, working with bare metal servers allows you to customize your infrastructure approach with little to no restrictions. Resources like CPU, RAM, and SSDs are fully customizable, with providers often offering the last versions. 

This unique approach towards infrastructure enables you to optimize at the most minute level as well. Hand picking the parts that make up your underlying infrastructure allow organizations to maximize computing power by reducing noisy neighbors, optimize resource consumption, and even control their IT costs, amongst other capabilities. The result is a high performance infrastructure model that’s completely predictable and within user grasp. 

Scaling at the Right Cost

Like many modern infrastructure models, bare metal servers are often based on a pay-as-you-go basis. Only pay for the resources you need and nothing else.

With bare metal servers, cost-effectiveness meets scalability. Scaling with these physical servers is as simple as onboarding more machines, only paying for those you’re renting out. Another plus of additional servers is removing a single point of failure; having replicated environments across these servers creates redundancy and can ensure uptime even if one application is down.

Bare Metal Servers Challenges

Despite the immense control and power that this physical infrastructure choice grants organizations, the challenges associated with it must be considered. Such challenges include:

Configuration Complexity

One of the biggest pros of having a dedicated bare metal server is the complete control you have over the machine and software specs. In the same vein, this might be one of your biggest challenges depending on experience.

Within an organization, only a handful of people have experience with configuring infrastructure down to the hardware. The reason why many people opt for options like VMs and container cloud infrastructure is because of cloud providers that take care of configuration and management. While bare metal server providers are able to aid you in configuration, having an experience truly tailored towards your needs will require some fine tuning and knowledge on your end.

Scalability and Resource Flexibility Constraints

The resource optimization and scalability prospects of bare metal have a caveat: they’re both severely restricted by the bare metal server provider.

As it turns out, there’s only so much space for machinery before it runs out. Sure scaling and resource optimization is as simple as adding more machinery and hardware to your current loadout, but the resources offered by providers are limited. Before using bare metal servers, it’s important to determine the scale you’re aiming for down the line, as well as how much flexibility your apps will actually need.

Potential for Higher Costs

As with any pay-as-you-go model, costs can be higher if usage increases. While this isn’t shocking by any means, the same idea applies to machine scaling and rent costs- just be sure that your IT budget accounts for this.

Bare Metal Hosting Use Cases

Bare metal servers offer unique benefits to organizations interested in taking it up, setting itself apart from its alternatives. That being said, there is a time and place for everything. With direct access to infrastructure hardware, organizations working with bare metal servers often do so because of its reliability and uptime, performing well with use cases like:

• Mission-Critical Apps: Apps and solutions that need to be up and running constantly, depending on the high reliability and availability of their bare metal servers. Such apps include healthcare systems, point-of-service systems, traffic control, and more to the point where inoperable status would significantly affect day to day life.
• Data-Intensive Apps: Applications holding and using a ton of data benefit greatly from bare metal infrastructure. Solutions such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, and databases are often housed within bare metal hardware and dedicated data centers
• Variable Apps: In this case, variability refers to the amount of users in a single session, as well as incoming and outgoing traffic. User amount and bandwidth greatly affect a system’s performance, with app outages often occurring as network bandwidth is stretched thin and workloads suffer under traffic pressure. Bare metal servers provide reliable and redundant systems that operate under pressure and distribute traffic competently

Also proving useful in situations revolving around containers and Kubernetes, as well as maintaining real-time communication systems, bare metal servers are truly an infrastructure powerhouse.

Bare Metal Providers Network with Lyrid

Bare metal servers have been around for ages now, but time hasn’t rendered them obsolete. Competing with the infrastructure titans in a cloud dominated world, bare metal hardware has proven to be a staple for organizations looking for reliability without sacrificing performance. This bare metal approach is also a favorite amongst companies that seek granular control over their infrastructure and costs, amongst other bare metal benefits.

Finding the right bare metal provider can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be with Lyrid. Our expansive data center network allows you to access the cutting edge hardware of renowned bare metal providers without the complexities of configuration. The Lyrid platform is offered on top of bare metal dedicated servers, giving you a user-friendly interface that utilizes the power of Kubernetes to streamline your deployments. A cloud agnostic approach to bare metal enables you to combine the power of a public or private cloud with the reliability of physical computer hardware. The best part is, our bare metal partners are located worldwide, letting you enter markets easier than ever before.

Looking to deploy on Lyrid? Or are you a data center provider looking to join our expansive network? Book a meeting with one of our product specialists and we’ll get you started!