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The first IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers built with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors

Build and save with new 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors

Get started with the latest Intel® Xeon® technology on IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers, today.

New Intel® Xeon® technology on IBM Cloud

Learn how Intel and IBM are committed to helping customers modernize and secure their HPC workloads.

Popular bare metal server configurations for traditional workloads

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Features

The IBM Cloud difference

Industry expertise and bare metal server technology you can trust

100% dedicated to you

Direct access to compute resources and hardware-level performance provides control and security. 

Always the latest technology

You get the latest-generation NVIDIA GPUs and x86 microarchitecture from Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC.

Modern networking, global data centers

Become operational quickly across 60 data centers and PoPs in 9 regions and 18 availability zones.

All server provisioning in one place

Launch our bare metal and virtual servers in the same environment over the same private VLAN.

Freedom from vendor lock-in

Choose your tools; integrate with providers and partners of your choice, at your convenience.

Convenient, pay-as-you-use billing

Choose the billing cycle option that works for you: on-demand hourly, monthly or contract-term.

Hosting solutions

Dedicated web hosting

Stream large files and videos. Specify and duplicate clustered web hosting servers to requirements.

Dedicated application hosting

Get security-rich, managed off-premises hosting. Integrate IBM Watson® services and more.

Dedicated game hosting

Scale to player demands quickly. Tailor rules, install updates, isolate players and get low ping.

Related products

IBM Cloud® Virtual Servers for VPC

Your own protected space in the IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC provide the advanced security of a private cloud with the agility and ease of a public cloud.

IBM Cloud for VMware

The cloud designed for enterprise. Migrate your business-critical VMware workloads to IBM Cloud with confidence and modernize your apps at your own pace.

GPUs

Servers with cutting-edge GPUs can handle complex compute-intensive workloads — from analytics and graphics to energy exploration and machine learning.

Frequently asked questions

Get answers to the most commonly asked questions about this product.

What is a bare metal server?

A bare metal server, also called a dedicated server by some, is a form of cloud services in which the user rents a physical machine from a provider that is not shared with any other tenants.

Unlike traditional cloud computing, which is based on virtual machines, bare metal servers do not come with a hypervisor preinstalled. This environment gives the user complete control over their server infrastructure.

Because users get complete control over the physical machine with a bare metal (or dedicated) server, they have the flexibility to choose their own operating system. A bare metal server helps avoid the noisy neighbor challenges of shared infrastructure and allows users to finely tune hardware and software for specific data-intensive workloads.

In addition to virtual servers, networking and storage, bare metal servers are a foundational component of the IaaS stack in cloud computing.

What are the benefits of a bare metal server?

The primary benefits of bare metal servers are based on the access that end users have to hardware resources. The advantages of this approach include the following:

  • Enhanced physical isolation which offers security and regulatory benefits
  • Greater processing power
  • Complete control of their software stack
  • More consistent disk and network I/O performance
  • Greater quality of service (QoS) by eliminating the noisy neighbor phenomenon
  • Imaging capability for creating a seamless experience when moving and scaling workloads

 

Taken together, bare metal servers have an important role in the infrastructure mix for many companies due to their unique combination of performance and control.

Why use a bare metal server?

  • Customized your way: Choose up to 96 cores, versatile storage, extensive memory and more.
  • Wherever you need your data: Over 60 data centers globally put data close to your users.
  • The latest technology always: Provision for SAP or add NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, VMware software and more.
  • Security: Enjoy highest-level data encryption with data visible only to you.

What's the difference between a bare metal server and a virtual server?

Today, available compute options for cloud services go beyond just bare metal servers and cloud servers. Containers are becoming a default infrastructure choice for many cloud-native applications. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings have an important niche of the applications market for developers who don't want to manage an OS or runtime environment. And serverless computing is emerging as the model of choice for cloud purists.

But, when evaluating bare metal servers, users still gravitate toward the comparison to virtual servers. For most companies, the criteria for choice are application specific or workload specific. It's extremely common for a company to use a mix of bare metal servers along with virtualized resources across their cloud environment.

Virtual servers are the more common model of cloud computing because they offer greater resource density, faster provisioning times, and the ability to scale up and down quickly as needs dictate. But bare metal servers are the right fit for a few primary use cases that take advantage of the combination of attributes. These attributes are dedicated resources, greater processing power, and more consistent disk and network I/O performance.

  • Performance-centric app and data workloads: The complete access and control over hardware resources make bare metal a good match for workloads such as HPC, big data and high-performance databases as well as gaming and finance workloads.
  • Apps with complex security or regulatory requirements: The combination of a global data center footprint with physical resource separation has helped many organizations adopt cloud while simultaneously meeting complex security and regulatory demands.
  • Large, steady-state workloads: For applications such as ERP, CRM or SCM that have a relatively stable set of ongoing resource demands, bare metal servers can also be a good fit.

What’s the difference between IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers with classic infrastructure and IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC?

Compared to the classic bare metal infrastructure, IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC provides the following advantages:

  • Security and performance of the private cloud combined with the flexibility and scalability that you expect of the public cloud
  • Integration with other VPC services — such as virtual server, security groups, networking and more
  • Faster provisioning and deployment, and simple hourly billing. Keep in mind that IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC is less customizable than classic IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers.

Get started on bare metal servers in minutes

You have options. Choose the bare metal infrastructure that works for you.