DBzTech-Technology Dossier

What is a Bare Metal Server

Bare metal servers are physical computers or dedicated servers that provide direct access to hardware resources—without any virtualization layer in between. Unlike virtual machines that share hardware among multiple users, a bare metal server is single-tenant, meaning it’s fully dedicated to one customer or workload.

Key Characteristics of Bare Metal Servers

• Exclusive Hardware Access: You get direct control over the CPU, memory, storage, and network resources without interference from hypervisors.
• High Isolation: Each bare metal server is physically separated from others. This ensures that performance spikes or security breaches in one environment do not affect another.
• Enhanced Performance and Security: Because there’s no virtualization overhead, bare metal servers deliver maximum performance and strong security, making them ideal for demanding workloads.

When to Use Bare Metal

Bare metal servers are ideal when your applications require:

• High performance computing (HPC)
• Stringent regulatory or compliance requirements
• Specialized workloads that cannot operate in virtualized environments

Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution

From a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) perspective, Bare Metal Solution, an IaaS offering provides dedicated physical servers designed to run workloads that are not suitable for virtual machines—such as Oracle Database deployments. Oracle workloads often require direct access to hardware resources for licensing and performance reasons, making GCP’s bare metal offering an ideal fit.

Infrastructure and Connectivity

An important distinction is that GCP Bare Metal Solution servers are not hosted directly inside Google’s core data centers. Instead, they reside in regional extensions, purpose-built facilities that are connected to Google’s private network via low-latency, high-speed links. This setup provides the performance and connectivity benefits of GCP while maintaining physical isolation.

The bare metal solution follows the Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) model, which makes the customer solely responsible for all the software licensing in their solutions.

To Conclude, Google’s Bare Metal Solution provides an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering for customers running specialized workloads like Oracle. These dedicated bare metal servers are deployed in regional extensions and connected to Google’s high-speed network backbone, delivering sub-2ms latency to other Google Cloud services.