What are bare metal servers?
Bare metal servers provide users with sole access to the entire server. Unlike a virtual server with multiple tenants, the pure bare metal server is single tenant and offered without a hypervisor, thereby eliminating the “noisy neighbor” effect and any performance “tax” from the hypervisor. Bare metal servers can be acquired in a preconfigured form or custom-configured to exact specifications.
Bare metal server features
Single tenant
A bare metal server dedicated to customers for complete control, flexibility, and security.
Computing power
From single processor 4-core architectures to quad-processor 12-core architectures and up to 3 TB RAM.
Local storage range
Up to 36 drives per server, with 800 GB to 1.2 TB SSDs.
Choose the best server for you
Bare metal server benefits
Customizable RAM, SSD and more
Choose a processor that best meets your performance needs. Upgrade from the base configuration to fine-tune the hardware for your workload.
On-demand accessibility
Provision servers in IBM Cloud™ data centers around the world in two to four hours. If you need to be online in minutes or need only limited resources, select an hourly bare metal server.
Bare metal server versions
Monthly bare metal
Order a monthly bare metal server built to specification, and it will be ready for you in two to four hours — with 500 GB per month outbound bandwidth included.
Hourly bare metal
Order an hourly bare metal server, and it will be ready for you in 20 – 30 minutes. Public outbound bandwidth is charged per gigabyte.
Reserved bare metal
Reserve up to 20 bare metal servers in the data center of your choice and claim them at any time. Requires a 1-year or 3-year contract. Ideal for sustained workloads.
See how IBM Cloud outperforms the competition
IBM versus AWS
AWS offers expensive bare metal options in six rigidly defined configurations. IBM Cloud offers hundreds of highly configurable options.
IBM versus Google Cloud
Google Cloud Platform only offers virtual servers. IBM Cloud offers bare metal and virtual servers that can communicate with each other.
IBM versus Alibaba
Alibaba Cloud bare metal instances aren’t truly bare metal. IBM Cloud offers bare metal with direct access to an entire server.
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Why Use a Bare Metal Server?
What are bare metal cloud servers?
Both dedicated and bare metal servers are 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, dedicated servers do not come with a hypervisor pre-installed and give the user complete control over their server infrastructure.
With a dedicated server, because users get complete control over the physical machine, they have the flexibility to choose their own operating system, avoid the “noisy neighbor” challenges of shared infrastructure, and finely tune hardware and software for specific, often data-intensive, workloads.
What is a hypervisor?
Before hypervisors hit the mainstream, most physical computers could only run one operating system (OS) at a time. This made them stable because the computing hardware only had to handle requests from that one OS. The downside of this approach was that it wasted resources because the operating system couldn’t always use all of the computer’s power.
A hypervisor solves that problem. It is a small software layer that enables multiple operating systems to run alongside each other, sharing the same physical computing resources. These operating systems come as virtual machines (VMs)—files that mimic an entire computing hardware environment in software.
The hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM), manages these VMs as they run alongside each other. It separates VMs from each other logically, assigning each its own slice of the underlying computing power, memory, and storage. This prevents the VMs from interfering with each other; so if, for example, one OS suffers a crash or a security compromise, the others survive.
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Footnote ㅤㅤ
*20 TB bandwidth included in US, Canada and EU data centers; 5 TB bandwidth included in all other data centers. New prices and offers may not be combined with any other current or future discounts.