Bare Metal for Big Data: Performance, Price and Value

In 1597, Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “Knowledge is power.” This may be no less true now than it was then, but a few things have changed: most notably, the magnitude of the volume of information we now have access to. And since the launch of the Information Age, that information has been growing exponentially.

Companies today need to leverage that information and turn it into knowledge quickly to remain competitive. As web traffic increases, wearable technologies are introduced, and the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to proliferate, what used to be measured in megabytes and gigabytes is now measured in petabytes and beyond.

Data analytics powered by batch processing overnight no longer suffices when data-driven decisions must be made in real time.

The Opportunity of Bare Metal for the Challenge of Big Data

Whether it’s on-demand advertising, financial analysis, preventive security, health care research, or any of the numerous other use cases for data analytics, companies and organizations are challenged with processing the growing volume of data being captured daily in real time. Alongside the growth of the amount of data, the costs of infrastructure to store and analyze that data have also increased substantially.

New technologies like Apache Hadoop and Aerospike have become standard frameworks for big data processing, and bare metal servers have become the most common method of delivering these frameworks in a high-performance and scalable architecture.

By running big data frameworks on bare metal servers, companies can leverage 100 percent of the hardware performance, while still maintaining scalability and automation through APIs—just like provisioning virtual instances in the cloud. This allows companies to not only get value from their data quickly to make informed decisions but also to easily scale the process as the data set continues to grow.

Big Data Performance and Bare Metal Value

But performance is just one piece of the equation. Even as demand for big data-driven decision-making grows, cost efficiency remains an ever-present consideration for many businesses. With a variety of service providers available, it can be difficult to evaluate your options.

INAP commissioned Cloud Spectator to compare our Bare Metal infrastructure running Aerospike and Hadoop against well-known industry heavyweights Amazon Web Services and IBM Cloud. The study compared both raw performance and performance per dollar spent.

The conclusion was clear: INAP’s Bare Metal goes toe-to-toe on performance with Amazon and IBM’s offerings at a more competitive price point—offering greater value. In Cloud Spectator’s testing, INAP Bare Metal provided up to 4.6-times better price-performance.

For more information on the performance and price-performance of INAP Bare Metal compared to IBM and AWS’s offerings, download Cloud Spectator’s report.