In the end, it is all just `cloud’

There may well be a certain amount of re-branding going on here – the classic smoke and mirrors tactic of calling something old and familiar by a new name so that it appears fresh and dynamic. That is certainly one possibility with the emergence of the phrase `bare metal’ in relation to the building of private cloud services.

By the same token, it could actually mark the start of a new development which brings private clouds much closer together with multi-tenanted public cloud service provision, allowing users to drift almost seamlessly into hybrid cloud services – at which point, of course, it all just becomes cloud services.

Private clouds have tended to come in two main varieties. One is the transformation of an existing on-premise installation so that it provides cloud-like delivery of existing applications as services. The other is the co-location model, where a business will rent space and facilities with a service provider and run their racks from there. The arrangement with the service provider can vary from just the provision of space, power and physical security of the service, through to full support and maintenance of the installed hardware and software.

It is the latter model that is now moving on to the next, bare metal stage. This is, in effect, the dedicated server model, where a business has specific hardware assigned to their workloads. The advantage is that the service provider takes on all the management of service provision, with the customer responsible only for the applications being used.

So to some extent there a fair degree of rebranding going on here to make the well-accepted use of dedicated server resources appear to be new and, well, more `sexed-up’.

But as Paul Vian, the UK Director of Business Development with Internap, explained, this is also being seen by many businesses as a step along the way to much wider adoption of cloud services, as just cloud, rather than the many sub-divisions of that so many of the vendors seem to want to impose of them.

“Yes, some customers are thinking in terms of using bare metal as a first step towards creating a hybrid cloud solution,” he said, “but many are already thinking in terms of bare metal as just cloud, where they are able to have as much as possible under their control and then using public services to accommodate bursting requirements.”

There is an argument that this approach makes a useful half-way house to the cloud for some businesses. Internap, certainly for now, limits its deployment to bare metal – just the hardware systems and the associated operating systems. This at least removes much of the Capex requirements for businesses that have experience of the systems and applications that they require.

By being remotely located, it also reduces much of the Opex to a service charge for the required management and support of the bare metal installation. This also makes the connection to bursting facilities much more straight forward as those resources are either in the same location, or directly connected to the fattest pipes Internap can provide.

This set up also creates a situation where those bursting facilities can be utilised in a wider and more flexible manner. For example, as the user’s experience of cloud services grows they will be able to determine which applications and services are best suited to bare metal and which best suited to multi-tenant operations. These are choices that will be driven by such criteria as performance and operational latencies, security issues, the stability of resource requirements and its alter-ego, the frequency and rate of change at which it needs to be scaled up and/or scaled down.

At present, such service capabilities are generally being sold as something special – hybrid cloud – but as Vian points out, in practice all businesses will find themselves requiring a mix of service types, from bare metal through to applications and services running in a multi-tenanted environment and on to fully public services that either offer specialised compute capabilities or are just public information resources.

“In the end, it is all just cloud services,” he said.