Gcore Cloud Bare Metal Servers: What They Are and How They Work

Bare metal servers are a standout offering within Gcore Cloud service. Bare metal servers present an opportunity to harness powerful processing capabilities and meticulously manage infrastructure, maximizing both performance and management of your computing environment.

In this article, we will explore what bare metal servers are, discuss their features and advantages, discover configuration possibilities, and explore Gcore’s bare metal locations and features.

What Are Bare Metal Servers?

Bare metal cloud services are akin to leasing a dedicated server from a cloud provider. Like traditional servers, these instances don’t come with a hypervisor pre-installed and offer direct access to the underlying hardware. This means that users don’t share system resources with other users, offering an exclusive usage experience.

Bare metal servers are managed and accessed via the cloud service’s management interfaces, which might be a web interface, command-line interface, or REST API. Certain bare metal instances are available on-demand, offering short-term, periodic billing. In this case, users receive a production-ready server with the operating system installed, post-install scripts successfully completed, and the network fully configured.

Advantages of Bare Metal Servers

Bare metal servers offer a combination of features and services that sets them apart from alternative hosting solutions, offering their users substantial advantages, including:

• High performance: Get direct access to the physical components of your server and use 100% of its resources.
• Fault tolerance: Minimize your server downtime with power backup and redundant network interfaces and disks in RAID 1.
• Data security: Leverage single-tenant access to hardware to avoid unwelcome intruders. An entire physical server dedicated exclusively to you means that only you, or authorized users with access rights, can connect to it.
• Fast deployment: Get your server ready within 10-15 minutes of purchase.
• Easy management: Create, build, and control your bare metals via the Gcore control panel, API, or Terraform provider.
• Scalability: Scale your resources up or down on demand. Whenever you need extra resources, you can easily create new virtual machines and bare metals and connect them to existing ones. Once your workload decreases, you can delete the added resources and stop paying for them.
• Hybrid landscape: Bring virtual machines and bare metals together into single networks.
• Gcore integration: Integrate bare metals with other Gcore services, such as CDN, Streaming Platform, or DDoS Protection.

What Bare Metal Servers Does Gcore Cloud Offer?

We offer different server configurations for different client needs and individualized use cases. Broadly, our offerings can be broken down into two categories:

• High-frequency, single-socket platforms based on Intel Xeon E-2288G and E-2388G. These platforms’ high clock frequency allows the machine to process a vast number of operations per second. These servers would be a good fit for anyone who primarily needs a quick processor.
• More powerful infrastructure server platforms based on Intel Xeon Silver 4314, Intel Xeon Gold 5320 and Intel Xeon Gold 6348. These have excellent suitability for high-load infrastructure applications or internal virtualization.

We closely cooperate with Dell and HP. Our server portfolio includes configurations with Intel-scalable Xeon 2nd and 3rd generations, and with AMD EPYC processors. We also provide customer server configurations; however, the time to deliver such servers is higher than for alternative options, because each server must pass a series of tests before being included in the available pool.

If you’re not sure what kind of server would be the best fit for your project, ask our managers for a consultation. They will be happy to explain different configurations to you in detail, and help you to select the optimal solution for your specific needs.

Core Features of our Bare Metal Servers

Gcore provides dedicated bare metal servers which are fully allocated to your exclusive usage. You get 100% of the hardware power, with no hypervisor and no virtualization layer. What’s more, you have the ability to manage the physical server just as easily as a virtual machine.

Gcore bare metal servers offer the following core services:

• Computing resources of a dedicated server with user-specific configuration
• UI/API management tools
• Internet connection with an accounting scheme for speed and traffic
• Public IPv4 address
• Option to connect multiple servers to a private network
• Automated OS installation with possibility to reinstall OS via UI/API
• Complete replacement of failed components and servers

How to Manage Gcore Bare Metal Servers

We offer extensive capabilities for managing your Cloud resources:

• Order and delete bare metal servers. A new machine will be ready for use within a few minutes of your order.
• Connect servers into networks and subnetworks.
• Set up private clusters for computation or app isolation.
• Divide your resources into projects within a single Cloud account.
• Provide access to resources and projects to different teams.
• Provide different access rights to different users.
• Manage your resource consumption and your budget.

There are three ways to manage your bare metal servers:

1. Through Gcore’s single, intuitive control panel.
2. Via API.
3. By creating config files in our Terraform provider. You can read more about this management options in our article “Why You Need Terraform”.

Managed Kubernetes Support for Bare Metal Nodes

Gcore also offers a Managed Kubernetes service on bare metal servers, offering users additional benefits:

• Bare metal infrastructure: Our Managed Kubernetes service runs on bare metal servers, providing users with dedicated resources and improved performance.
• Easy deployment: Users can easily deploy their Kubernetes clusters with just a few clicks, thanks to our intuitive web-based interface, REST API, and Terraform.
• High availability: The service is designed to provide high availability, with automatic failover and self-healing capabilities.
• Scalability: Users can easily scale their Kubernetes clusters up or down as needed, without any downtime.

The Managed Kubernetes service for bare metal nodes is currently available in following locations, with rollout to 64 additional locations coming soon across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and São Paulo. Our current locations are:

• US
  • Manassas
• Europe
  • Frankfurt
  • Luxembourg
• Asia
  • Singapore

Bare Metal Server Regional Availability

Currently, dedicated servers are available in 20+ different locations, including:

• Almaty
• Amsterdam
• Dubai
• Frankfurt
• Hong Kong
• Istanbul
• Johannesburg
• London
• Luxembourg
• Manassas
• Mumbai
• Paris
• Santa Clara
• São Paolo
• Seoul
• Singapore
• Sydney
• Tokyo
• Warsaw

How To Connect Gcore Cloud Bare Metal Servers

If you’re already connected to our Cloud, you can order a dedicated server in your personal account.

New users must register first.

Conclusion

1. A bare metal server (or a dedicated server) is a physical server that a client rents from the provider in its entirety.
2. Unlike virtual machines, dedicated servers provide better control over the hardware, predictable computing power, and lower latency. Since they’re an isolated resource, they’re also considered safer.
3. Gcore Cloud has different configurations to solve different tasks. We offer high-frequency machines for the projects that require quick processing power, and infrastructurally stronger server platforms for heavier apps and internal virtualization.
4. Bare metal gives you access to the entire feature set of our Cloud. You can connect an AI platform, balance load, connect apps from the catalog or integrate the Cloud with our other products.
5. Dedicated servers can be purchased, deleted, connected into networks, or joined into private clusters, divided into projects and set up to provide various access levels for different team members. The entire infrastructure can be managed through a single personal account, API, or through a Terraform provider.
6. You can order a server in your personal account and it will be ready within minutes.

Connect dedicated servers and use our strong and reliable infrastructure to test new products and release them to the market faster and at a lower cost.