What is a Bare Metal Server?

A bare metal server is a physical server dedicated to a single tenant. The server’s tenant can optimize the server according to its needs for performance, security and reliability. The alternative to a bare metal server is a hypervisor server, in which multiple users share a virtual server’s compute, storage and other resources.

Bare metal servers are also known as single-tenant physical servers or managed dedicated servers. On a bare metal server, the operating system is installed directly on to the server, eliminating layers and delivering better performance.

A business can run dedicated servers in its own data center or a colocation center, or rent them on an hourly or monthly subscription basis from a managed service provider.

How Can Rackspace Help?

As a fully managed hosting provider, we have provided countless companies with bare metal servers, whether they’re using public, private or hybrid clouds. Our dedicated server customers include Abilene Christian University — a private college in Texas that needed to upgrade its legacy systems and optimize the performance of its IT infrastructure. We’ve also helped Kurtosys, a London-based financial technology software company, reliably provide its digital offerings in a private cloud.

We have worked with these companies, and numerous others, to understand their unique business needs and pain points — and to provide them with the best configuration of bare metal servers for their public, private and hybrid clouds.

Need more info about the different types of servers? Check out this comparison of dedicated servers vs. cloud servers.

Are Bare Metal Servers the Right Fit?

Despite their overwhelming popularity, bare metal servers are not the best choice for every type of business.

Companies in the financial, healthcare and retail industries opt for single-tenant, bare metal servers to meet stringent requirements for regulatory compliance, privacy and security. But businesses that don’t need the performance and security requirements of a dedicated environment are often a good fit for a fully managed, virtualized environment.