Typically with a cloud deployment, server assets are virtual and customers don’t get to choose the physical underlying hardware, the actual bare-metal that an application will run on. The Rackspace OnMetal service first launched in June 2014, enabling users to directly deploy an OpenStack cloud onto physical hardware.
“The first generation of OnMetal Cloud Servers was built to prove out the concept and validate demand for a bare-metal cloud server,” Rhett Dillingham, senior director of product management at Rackspace, told eWEEK.