Did you know you can now consume your bare metal as a service? And not just physical servers but networking and storage too? Cloud service providers, systems integrators and enterprise customers alike can now provide compute, storage and networking to end customers and business units as a service – all deployed at the click of a button.
We’re proud to announce Dell Technologies has partnered with MetalSoft®, an industry pioneer, innovator and leader in the space of bare metal solutions, to create a joint solution that is unique to the industry that serves integrators, cloud providers and enterprise customers.
Companies of all sizes and verticals, not just Cloud Service Providers, have bare metal infrastructure at their core. To offer this infrastructure as-a-Service internally or externally, a service provider or enterprise IT organization not only needs to make the investment in hardware, but also needs to have the engineering and operational staff to manage it, for which hiring and retaining can be difficult. What if there was a way to automate the entire hardware lifecycle, free those critical staff members from mundane tasks to focus on other revenue-generating – and probably more exciting – activities?
At the same time, users are now more demanding about the types of services they need with regard to their business requirements, and bare metal infrastructure is no longer able to compete with the public cloud in terms of flexibility and speed of delivery. Users are not content having access to a server in weeks because different teams need to configure networking and storage. In this new landscape of agile development and DevOps, customers want fully functional, ready-to-use infrastructure as part of day zero, ready to host their applications for their business solutions. It’s with that mindset they ask not just for provisioned servers, but also for storage capacity configured for those servers and networking to connect them, all at the click of a button. To have an entire platform of compute, storage and networking, along with a computing stack such as Kubernetes, is the overarching goal for service providers and enterprise IT organizations today. The service needs to be ready to run workloads at an instant.
Here is the list of features this solution enables using Dell hardware and the MetalSoft software:
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- Full lifecycle automation. Reducing OpEx expenditures and automating deployments and reclamation of assets in their datacenters and co-locations.
- Self-service-based consumption. End users can build entire infrastructures complete with bare metal compute, private network segments and storage on their own.
- Infrastructure as code. The bare metal infrastructure can now be part of the same CI/CD pipelines as the applications running on it improving the development and reliability.
- Instant server replace. By “moving” switch configurations from a failed server to a new server, clients can be up and running with minimal delay after a hardware failure.
CSPs and enterprises can now acquire Dell Technologies hardware via CapEx, term or other consumption models and, using the MetalSoft® software, provide it as a service to end customers and business units, with minimal staff requirements.
At the same time, service providers looking to leverage their footprint with edge-type offerings can leverage the MetalSoft software’s scalability and ability to stand up sites with zero touch and operate them remotely from a single pane of glass.
Another use case is emerging from the same talent shortage: cloud repatriation. Many enterprises that want the advantage of the public cloud’s scale find themselves in the impossible situation of having lifted and shifted workloads to the cloud only to discover they’re unable to optimize their workloads to take advantage of it ending up paying more than estimated.
Automated infrastructure, like the one Dell and MetalSoft now offer, provides an alternative to those companies looking to lower their cloud costs, bringing back some of those workloads on the hardware they own and operate.
We invite our customers and partners to explore this unique new opportunity to expand their business, create a new revenue stream and optimize their operations.
Please contact your account manager for more information. To learn more about this solution, visit the Knowledge Center or email us.
