The IT industry continues to struggle with supply chain challenges due to the lingering effects of pandemic-related shutdowns and transportation disruptions. Many organizations are waiting six months or more for some IT products. They are unable to maintain their technology refresh cycles or launch new initiatives that would benefit the business.
The cloud isn’t always an alternative. Organizations often need the performance, security and isolation of dedicated servers for mission-critical applications. High-performance workloads in particular aren’t well-suited to the cloud.
Bare metal cloud offerings have emerged to address these limitations. Organizations can utilize dedicated, single-tenant servers in an opex, pay-per-use model. The customer maintains full control of the server hardware yet gains the scalability and rapid provisioning of a cloud instance.
Cyxtera’s Enterprise Bare Metal Solution
Cyxtera has developed a unique bare metal cloud service with flexible month-to-month terms. Depending on the hardware requirements, customers can spin up a server and begin transferring virtual machines in less than a day. Cyxtera maintains server inventory in all of its regions as well as centrally in its Dallas-Ft. Worth campus, and can generally obtain custom equipment rapidly due to its relationships with vendors.
When a customer places an order, Cyxtera deploys the server in one of its 65 data centers worldwide. If the server is “racked and stacked” it can be provisioned in minutes. Once the hardware is in place, the customer can access it via a web-based portal that provides the tools needed to spin up servers, create clusters and provision all of the networking components in the form of VLANs.
This is made possible by the Cyxtera Digital Exchange, a software-defined network stack that Cyxtera has implemented at all of its data centers. It gives customers a way to connect the bare metal servers to the outside world.
Flexible, All-Inclusive Subscription
Cyxtera’s Enterprise Bare Metal offering gives customers access to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions from Nutanix and servers from Dell and HPE. Customers consume dedicated resources in a cloudlike experience but with a colocation feel.
There’s no contention with other customers, and no oversubscription of compute, storage or networking.
Customers have the option of month-to-month and one-, two-, three- and five-year commitments. The monthly recurring fee for each type of server includes everything — the power, the rack, the switching and the software-defined network. There’s no access charge or data ingress or egress fees.
The solution eliminates the need to purchase server hardware or maintain the equipment. Cyxtera ensures that the servers are up and running and the network is available, and provides break/fix repair and replacement of the physical hardware.
Security is a key benefit of Cyxtera’s solution. The servers are housed in racks that are controlled by the Cyxtera team, and are connected diversely to a network stack that Cyxtera owns and operates.
Cyxtera’s Partnership with SirviS
Cyxtera is not a managed services provider (MSP). Customers must handle all of the administrative tasks on the bare metal server. However, Cyxtera partners with MSPs such as SirviS to provide additional services from the operating system up.
The SirviS team procures the bare metal servers for customers and adds a managed services layer on top of it. Customers can opt for monitoring and management only, with SirviS escalating issues to the customer’s IT team, or a fully managed solution in which SirviS addresses any issues that arise. SirviS also provides proactive maintenance and managed backup and recovery.
In our next post, we’ll delve deeper into the benefits of Cyxtera’s Enterprise Bare Metal offering and how managed services from SirviS complete the solution.
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