New IaaS Brings Supercomputing Performance to Big Data Processing

Grazed from BigStep. Author: PR Announcement.

A new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has launched in the UK today that uses bare metal power to bring supercomputing speeds to the commercial sector and provide a high-performance environment for big data applications.

Bigstep combines bare metal performance with the flexibility of the cloud to create what is thought to be the world’s most powerful public computing infrastructure. It allows organisations to process big data faster and more effectively than any other means and offers fully self-service bare metal allocation by the hour…

Bigstep is an exclusively bare metal infrastructure which uses only the latest generation HP servers and has no hypervisor, which according to industry benchmarks waste up to 40 per cent of the bare metal power of servers. All this computing power is provided with the functionality and flexibility of the cloud.

“Big data demands high powered computing and not using a hypervisor means Bigstep can provide 20-100 per cent more performance per resources than any virtual cloud,” said Ioana Hreninciuc, Commercial Director, Bigstep. “We believe we are the most powerful public computing infrastructure in the world and the perfect cloud for any organisation that is serious about crunching its big data in real-time and utilising it to make informed and impactful business decisions.”

Cloudera is one of the leader companies in Apache Hadoop-based software and services and offers a powerful data platform that enables enterprises to view all their data. Given the need for fast processing of this big data, Cloudera has been one of a number of partners involved in the benchmarking and testing of Bigstep.

Because Bigstep uses no hypervisor, all switching is also done on physical networking equipment. This drastically improves networking latency, frees up processing resources in the physical servers, and offers direct control over the physical ports in the switch, allowing for port-to-port networking. Machines have a maximum connectivity of 44 GbE, at wire speed. This means Bigstep provides the fastest networking out of all public clouds, between 44 and 440 times more capacity than that supplied by the current 1 Gbps or 100 Mbps uplinks.

The storage is all-SSD and centralised. With hot data and OS files stored on SSD disks, the risk of I/O bottlenecks is eliminated and I/O intensive applications will see dramatic increases in performance. Local storage can be provided upon request.

Should any organisation want the additional security that comes with a private cloud, the lack of hypervisor means Bigstep is able to provide Cloud-in-Cloud capability, the opportunity to build private clouds on top of Bigstep infrastructure, using any hypervisor in the market.

Bigstep hardware is physically isolated with no shared resources, meaning the risk of outside interference is greatly minimised. Users can also meet different countries’ data privacy requirements by choosing exactly where their data is hosted.

“Without the computing power to process it quickly and efficiently, the value of big data is severely compromised,” said Ioana Hreninciuc. “But we also know that organisations might only need such processing power for a short time, so why should they pay for more than that? Cloud flexibility on a bare metal infrastructure is a compelling proposition and provides a high-performance, secure and robust environment for big data applications.”

Bigstep is a spin-off company from Hostway Corporation, formed when the UK and Romanian Hostway offices joined together. With offices in London and Bucharest, its data centre is located in Reading with others to follow across Europe in 2014.