This is an interesting announcement for a few reasons:
1) It's true that VMs generally provide bad performance for high i/o applications, particularly databases. There are various ways to mitigate this such as using high IOPS drives like AWS EBS PIOPS or SSD backed storage from Google/Digital Ocean.
2) This is using OpenCompute and is all open source and going to be released, so they can take advantage of the efficiencies of that hardware architecture.
3) It gives you quick access to physical servers connected to your cloud environment. Benefits of flexibility/scalability with the benefits of hardware. This seems to be how they're differentiating against Softlayer who have bare metal servers available via API, but they're billed monthly and take a few hours to provision (which is still pretty impressive).
However, there is no pricing announced - this will be key.
Also, will this start to eat into their managed services perhaps? Anticipating disruption?
1) It's true that VMs generally provide bad performance for high i/o applications, particularly databases. There are various ways to mitigate this such as using high IOPS drives like AWS EBS PIOPS or SSD backed storage from Google/Digital Ocean.
2) This is using OpenCompute and is all open source and going to be released, so they can take advantage of the efficiencies of that hardware architecture.
3) It gives you quick access to physical servers connected to your cloud environment. Benefits of flexibility/scalability with the benefits of hardware. This seems to be how they're differentiating against Softlayer who have bare metal servers available via API, but they're billed monthly and take a few hours to provision (which is still pretty impressive).
However, there is no pricing announced - this will be key.
Also, will this start to eat into their managed services perhaps? Anticipating disruption?