The Benefits of Bare-Metal Clouds

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Tiffany Trader.

Today’s clouds are built on a mix of technologies, including virtualization, automation and orchestration. In some circles, virtualization is nearly synonymous with cloud, but above all a cloud is a pool of resources that is elastic, scalable and accessible on-demand. For the HPC community especially, much of the cloud computing that takes place is of the "bare metal" kind, aka non-virtualized cloud.

Although today’s server virtualization is a lot sleeker than in years past, nothing can beat the performance of bare metal. Some of the issues with virtualized cloud computing were detailed recently by Internap Vice President of Hosted Services Gopala Tumuluri…

Tumuluri explains what most HPCers already know: the virtualized, multi-tenant platform common to most public clouds is subject to performance degradation. "While the hypervisor enables the visibility, flexibility and management capabilities required to run multiple virtual machines on a single box, it also creates additional processing overhead that can significantly affect performance," writes Tumuluri…

Read more from the source @ http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2013-08-27/the_benefits_of_bare-metal_clouds.html