Why Cloud Will Not Kill The Good Old Dedicated Server

Cloud Computing has gone from a technology infrastructure trend in the early 2000's to a technology mainstream in 2020. The main difference between "The Cloud" and the traditional computing, which is based on the use of bare-metal dedicated serves is that, on the Cloud all computing services - routing, switching, server instances, all applications - are delivered from virtualized environments that reside on top of clusters of servers. Compute Clouds are easy to scale up when it comes to CPU, RAM and Storage.

There are many advantages that make Cloud Servers preferred form of IT infrastructure, compared to the physical (also called Bare-Metal) Dedicated Servers. However, this publication isn’t about the benefits of the Cloud. It is about what makes the physical servers a preferred choice for many businesses.

Control Means Control

Companies have full control over the IT environment when they colocated their own or use a leased Dedicated Server. The physical servers can be migrated fast from one infrastructure points to another (especially those used for private business workloads), can handle significant loads and usually feature increased availability.

Each hardware appliance comes with certain hardware specifications and IT departments have the flexibility to customize their bare-bone IT infrastructure. They can change configurations, add capacity and plan the resource usage. Businesses usually need some form of computing resource redundancy when they buy or rent bare-metal servers and it usually comes either in form of a one time hardware purchase or as a low monthly fee. Unlike the physical hardware, the Cloud means an increased operation costs.

Metal Means Metal

If any business needs low latency interconnect, a 10 GigE or even higher connectivity, it can plan and get a bare-metal servers with multiple 10 GE interfaces, could use SFP+ or QSFP transceivers. It is easy and inexpensive to connect a physical dedicated server to 10 Gbps, 20 Gbps or 40 Gbps connection. it just requires a physical server with a certain hardware specifications to be bought or rented. A Cloud Server on 10 Gbps, 20 Gbps or 40 Gbps connection is an expensive service, which requires subscription.

High performance business applications, media streaming and many real-time IT analytics services work much better on stand-alone Bare-Metal servers or or interconnected physical servers. For those kind of technology operations, the “good old physical server” is a much more stable and reliable form of an IT infrastructure solution compared to the Cloud Servers.

Dedicated Means Dedicated

Any bare-metal Dedicated Server provides guaranteed, physically isolated computing resources in single-tenant IT environment, which can be switched to multi-pennant, through the use of some cluster technologies like Red Hat Cluster Suite, for example.

When we run IT service in OS environments created directly on the physical servers, this saves some of the resources which are usually lost on the virtualized environments. The bare-metal servers do not incur the overhead of Virtual Server platforms.

Finally, in an event of a natural disaster such as fire, flood or major failure, the use of physical dedicated servers makes it easier for the system administrators to recreate service environments and data from scratch on a new physical host systems. The IT environments are recovered on a physical hardware where without file formats, partitions or operating systems.

Fast growing and big businesses which operate high bandwidth IT environments traffic and have large resource requirements benefit a lot from a bare-metal dedicated servers. Unlike the Cloud Servers, the physical servers are also preferred option for many regulated industries, for the educational institutions or for the public sector, both to be used in data centers or at the branch as on premise IT infrastructure. So, despite that the Cloud Computing systems are getting more and more popular, many organizations still see a number of advantages in using the “good old” physical dedicated servers and this will continue for at least another decade.