Announcing the Industry’s Only SaaS Managed Bare Metal Orchestration Platform
In our previous blog on why bare metal cannot, yet, be operated as a cloud, we outlined the problem in our industry about how bare metal management is critical in industries like retail, 5G and Telco, and research, as well as for use-cases such as private cloud elasticity and high-performance computing (HPC). Yet, today bare metal management is manual, slow, siloed, and expensive, and the current solutions come up short.
We’ve been listening to our customers very carefully over the past year, to understand the gap in the end-to-end experience and the pain of bare metal orchestration. Based on their feedback, we have developed a comprehensive solution that will make the provisioning, deployment, and management of your bare metal infrastructure fast and easy with the added peace of mind of being fully-managed, backed by our experts in cloud management.
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Platform9 Managed Bare Metal. This is the industry’s only cloud-ready SaaS managed bare metal orchestration platform. Whether you are operating thousands of remote sites, running performance-sensitive ML algorithms in your private cloud, or want to move Compute and data closer to your IoT sensors, you can now offload the overhead of operating your bare metal cloud to Platform9.
Platform9 Managed Bare Metal brings cloud-like simplicity to bare metal deployments, whether located at the Edge or in private clouds. The product manages and automates the lifecycle of bare metal to flexibly deploy any workload anywhere, at a moment’s notice: Kubernetes, databases, HPC, virtual machines. Platform9 is the only solution in the industry that provides an end-to-end seamless cloud operating model across the entire stack, from application and virtual infrastructure down to physical servers.
The new offering enables DevOps, cloud engineering and SRE teams with highest application performance, effortless scaling, accelerated Kubernetes or Virtualization based private cloud or edge deployments.
Our Managed Bare Metal offering works seamlessly with Platform9 Managed Kubernetes to provide end-to-end management of Kubernetes clusters running on bare metal, no matter where they are located.
Platform9 Managed Bare Metal Capabilities
Platform9 Managed Bare Metal is focused on delivering the following key advantages:
1Instant provisioning of bare metal servers: reducing the time required to provision a new server from weeks to minutes and with little to no manual effort. Whether you are expanding your data center footprint or running bare metal servers in edge locations, you can now provision hundreds of servers seamlessly without wasting the cycles of your best technical resources.
Instant provisioning of bare metal servers
Self-service consumption of bare metal clouds
SaaS Management Plane
Use Cases
A number of our customers spanning a variety of industries and use cases are asking Platform9 about automated bare metal orchestration. They include:
1. Retail Edge
One of our retail customers- a large coffee chain – is leveraging this bare metal management capability to provide “zero-touch” automation and updates for their full hardware and software stacks in thousands of coffee stores around the country. With Platform9, they are able to leverage their existing footprint of commodity servers, avoiding net new hardware investment. Furthermore, they are saving on operational costs because they don’t need to send technical staff onsite for manual provisioning and management of these servers.
2. Telco and 5G
A large communications service provider we are working with is looking to deploy a Kubernetes managed solution to these Edge locations, to enable agility and elasticity at the 5G edge. Provisioning and managing bare metal servers distributed to such edge locations is a significant part of enabling these technologies. Eliminating the need to manually manage these edge servers drastically reduces the effort in distributing these technologies across geographical boundaries.
3. Private Cloud
Our conversations with global companies running private clouds have revealed that provisioning bare metal servers often takes weeks, impacting how quickly IT can adapt to changing business needs. Provisioning bare metal servers is also manual and tedious, consuming precious cycles from technical experts. Enabling the IT team to provision and deploy servers with the click of a button and in minutes will significantly impact the efficiency of the organization as a whole.
4. HPC
Our conversations with enterprises in the EDA industry have revealed that data scientists run HPC jobs which are specialized, not always predictable, and need to be run on bare metal due to the nature of their performance-sensitivity. Due to the unpredictable nature of these workloads, the elasticity of a true bare metal cloud is highly desirable.
Alternatives
While there are a number of alternative products that address parts of this problem, organizations still seek an end-to-end solution.
- Google Anthos on Bare Metal is a great way to connect your already-provisioned servers to a multi-cloud Kubernetes environment, but leaves all the bare metal provisioning and deployment to you
- Public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure Stack Edge and Amazon EKS make provisioning seamless, but are expensive and lock you into their technology and hardware stacks
- VMware’s Project Monterey requires a new component (SmartNIC) in your infrastructure, and also locks you into the VMware ecosystem
- Standalone bare metal orchestration tools like Metal-as-a-Service will help you build a bare metal cloud, but don’t give you an easy way to integrate it with the rest of your private cloud for agility and operational simplicity
Integrate Bare Metal into your Next Generation Cloud Experience
Platform9 is on a mission to build the next generation cloud experience, and it is clear to us that bare metal orchestration is an integral part of this journey for our customers. This is why we’ve built the industry’s first cloud-ready SaaS managed bare metal orchestration platform. It provides the flexibility of being deployed either standalone to automate bare metal server management, or as part of a complete end-to-end solution when coupled with Platform9 Managed OpenStack (PMO) or Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK).
There are products in the industry that enable you to add bare metal servers to Kubernetes, but don’t automate bare metal provisioning, nor are fully managed. There are others that simplify bare metal provisioning by providing specialized hardware and software stacks, but most enterprises are wary of the vendor lock-in issues that this creates. And finally, there are standalone bare metal automation products that leave it to you to figure out how to connect the provisioned servers to a Kubernetes cluster or private cloud. With Platform9 Managed Bare Metal, you get a fully managed service, the freedom to provision managed bare metal servers, and deploy any workload, anywhere, at any time.
Bring your Metal and We will Help You Get Started Now!
Provide your own physical servers with some basic network interfaces, deploy our bare metal controller on premises, and connect to Platform9 Managed Bare Metal to start provisioning and managing your bare metal infrastructure like a public cloud!
Contact our experts for a consultation and get started with your Proof of Concept today!
For more information,
- Read the detailed documentation
- Visit the product page
- Read the press release
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