DEVOPSdigest

Platform9 unveiled the cloud ready, fully managed bare metal solution: Platform9 Managed Bare Metal.

Now, IT teams can transform their installed physical servers into bare metal clouds, leveraging the API-driven automation and simplicity of Platform9's SaaS managed experience and bare metal controller.

Top capabilities of the new product provide cloud agility to bare metal infrastructure and include:

- Enabling high application performance: The solution allows applications to run at full performance without contention combined with the operational simplicity of a public cloud. IT Teams can now easily deploy and manage performance sensitive workloads, including Big Data, Analytics, and Databases.

- Building private clouds with little effort and high flexibility: SaaS Managed bare metal enables operations teams to build and manage private clouds with a single click, leveraging bare metal orchestration integrated seamlessly with Platform9 Managed Kubernetes and OpenStack solutions. This allows IT to quickly adopt the bare metal environment to changing dev/test or business needs, from hypervisor to container cluster to database server and any future role.

- Running both Kubernetes and Edge on bare metal: Organizations globally are trying to leverage Kubernetes on physical servers. With Managed Bare Metal, organizations running Kubernetes can now orchestrate their physical servers with zero effort. This provides the full power of API driven orchestrations for bare metal infrastructure for any application, datacenter or edge.

"Historically, bare metal limitations have stymied cloud deployments," said Madhura Maskasky, Platform9 co-founder and VP of Product. "Examples of inefficiencies include entire hypervisors consumed by single applications that demand 100% CPU/RAM, leaving the hypervisor as an impediment to performance as no viable physical server orchestration option exists. This results in hypervisors' licenses being wasted and physical servers sitting idly waiting for the perfectly sized workload."

With Platform9 Managed Bare Metal, IT teams can now efficiently build out private and edge clouds, allowing quick deployment of bare metal clouds, virtualization stacks, and containers with Kubernetes in multiple use cases including:

- On premises bare metal cloud: The solution supports the rapid build out of high performance on-premise bare metal clouds and automated deployment of performance-sensitive workloads directly on physical servers, such as databases, big data, analytics, and AI/ML.

- 5G Telco Edge: Fully automated deployment of vRAN or packet core software at tens of thousands of cell tower/remote telco edge locations, using Platform9's Managed Bare Metal capability combined with virtualization and/or Kubernetes offerings. Provisioning and managing bare metal servers distributed to such edge locations is a significant part of enabling these technologies. Eliminating the need to manually manage these edge servers drastically reduces the effort in distributing these technologies across geographical boundaries.

- Retail Edge: Bare metal can fully automate remote deployment of thousands of retail stores end to end use using remote bare metal orchestration capability combined with Platform9's virtualization and/or Kubernetes offerings.

Maskasky continued, "Our latest product release addresses a long standing problem faced by IT, DevOps, and SRE teams -- how to best realize the potential of their bare metal server deployments and face the challenges of new edge deployments across numerous industries. For example, one of the largest coffee chains in the world is leveraging our bare metal management capability to provide 'zero touch' automation and updates for their full hardware and software stacks in thousands of coffee stores around the country. This allows them to centrally and remotely deploy and manage a variety of virtual and container applications and associated servers within their stores."