Blog/Article
How bare metal servers can nullify outages
Server downtime is synonymous with losing money in the current digital market landscape, making bare metal servers an increasingly critical infrastructure choice for organizations demanding maximum uptime.
Unlike virtualized environments that share resources across multiple users, these dedicated servers provide complete hardware isolation and direct access to physical components.
Specifically, bare metal infrastructure eliminates the common points of failure found in traditional cloud setups, reducing the risk of unexpected outages and performance degradation.
Summary
The switch to bare metal architecture delivers measurable improvements in reliability and performance. Organizations running mission-critical applications on dedicated servers report near-perfect uptime, with many achieving the coveted 99.9% availability benchmark.
By the end of this article, you will be 100% convinced that dedicated servers are the best solution for your business. You can deploy one in seconds right now.
The Architecture Behind 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
The architectural foundation of bare metal servers enables unprecedented levels of reliability, forming the basis for the coveted 99.9% uptime guarantee organizations increasingly demand.
Latitude.sh offers service level agreements (SLAs) of up to 99.9%, ensuring maximum reliability for mission-critical applications. This near-perfect uptime stems from several key architectural advantages that set bare metal servers apart from virtualized alternatives.
Physical Isolation vs. Virtual Environments
Bare metal servers operate in single-tenant environments where the physical resources cannot be shared with multiple users.
A bare metal instance is a standalone physical server that belongs exclusively to one customer. This physical separation creates a fundamental reliability advantage over virtualized infrastructure.
Multiple tenants share the same underlying hardware in virtual environments, creating potential resource conflicts.
Bare metal servers, however, eliminate the "noisy neighbor effect" prevalent in virtual ecosystems. This isolation means performance spikes from other users cannot impact your server's operation, ensuring consistent availability.
Furthermore, physical isolation provides enhanced security benefits. With no shared resources, bare metal servers reduce the attack surface, making it significantly more difficult for cybercriminals to access sensitive systems.
This security architecture directly contributes to uptime by preventing security-related outages.
Direct Hardware Access Advantage
A defining characteristic of bare metal servers is their unrestricted access to the underlying hardware. The name "bare metal" itself emphasizes that tenants have direct access to physical components without intermediary layers.
This direct hardware connection delivers several reliability benefits:
Predictable performance: Applications receive consistent resource allocation without competing workloads, crucial for high-availability systems.
Complete control: Full hardware configuration control allows optimization for specific workloads and high-availability requirements.
Lower latency: Direct hardware interaction reduces processing delays, which is especially important for time-sensitive applications.
Additionally, bare metal environments often allow organizations to leverage customized hardware components.
For applications requiring GPUs or specialized network cards, bare metal servers enable more effective utilization of hardware features through technologies like Single Root I/O Virtualization.
This hardware-level optimization contributes to more reliable application performance.
Elimination of Hypervisor Overhead
Perhaps the most significant architectural advantage of bare metal servers lies in the absence of a hypervisor layer.
Bare metal environments remove an entire layer of complexity and potential failure points by deploying directly on physical servers instead of inside virtual machines.
Consequently, applications run with minimal latency and maximum efficiency. This streamlined architecture produces two critical reliability benefits.
First, with no virtualization hypervisor consuming resources, more computing power remains available for workloads. Second, containers or applications gain direct access to bare metal hardware resources like GPUs on host servers.
Moreover, this architectural simplification reduces the overall attack surface.
In a bare metal world, IT teams still manage physical hardware, but they eliminate the need to set up, manage, secure, and troubleshoot hypervisor software and VM profiles.
Each eliminated layer is one less potential point of failure that could trigger downtime.
The result is a more streamlined, efficient, and ultimately more reliable computing environment that consistently delivers on the 99.9% uptime promise organizations require for their critical workloads.
Critical Hardware Components That Prevent Failures
Hardware reliability forms the foundation of bare metal server stability, with several critical components working together to achieve the promised 99.9% uptime.
The physical elements that prevent system failures are carefully selected and configured to eliminate single points of failure through redundancy and enterprise-grade quality.
Enterprise-Grade CPUs and Memory
Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors are the backbone of reliable bare metal servers, offering substantial advantages over consumer-grade alternatives.
These enterprise CPUs provide built-in security capabilities that establish a root of trust during server startup, helping prevent security-related outages.
Redundant Power Supply Systems
Power failures rank among the most common causes of server hardware failure. Redundant power supplies effectively eliminate this vulnerability by incorporating multiple physical power units within a single server.
Each power supply maintains the capacity to run the device independently, ensuring continuous operation even if one unit fails.
The primary benefit of this approach is the elimination of a critical single point of failure. When one power supply malfunctions, the second automatically compensates to provide full power without any service interruption.
Furthermore, this design enables hot-swapping of failed components – administrators can remove and replace defective power supplies without taking systems offline.
For mission-critical deployments, connecting each redundant power supply to separate electrical circuits provides additional protection against circuit trips or electrical maintenance.
This configuration allows maintenance work on electrical equipment without affecting server operations.
RAID Configuration for Storage Reliability
RAID technology combines multiple disk drives into virtualized logical units, significantly improving storage reliability. Unlike backup solutions designed for catastrophic recovery, RAID prevents data loss through real-time redundancy.
When you deploy with Latitude.sh, for instance, you get the following RAID options:
RAID 0 (Striping):
Performance: Data is split across multiple disks, allowing simultaneous read and write operations and significantly boosting performance.
Risk: Lacks redundancy; if one disk fails, all data in the array is lost.
RAID 1 (Mirroring):
Redundancy: Data is duplicated across two or more disks, ensuring that if one disk fails, the data remains accessible from the other.
Capacity: Total storage capacity equals that of a single disk, as data is mirrored.
These RAID options are available during server deployment or reinstallation, allowing you to tailor your storage setup to prioritize either performance or data redundancy.
Network Interface Redundancy and More
Latitude.sh offers several redundancy options beyond RAID to ensure high availability and reliability:
Network Redundancy: Latitude.sh implements core-level network redundancy by creating multiple pathways for data transmission. This design ensures that alternative routes maintain continuous data flow between servers and the internet if one network component fails, minimizing downtime and enhancing connectivity.
Link Aggregation (Bonding): At the server level, Latitude.sh employs link aggregation, also known as bonding, by combining multiple network interfaces into a single logical connection. This approach increases bandwidth and provides failover capabilities; if one connection fails, the remaining connections sustain network access, thereby improving data transfer speeds and ensuring uninterrupted service.
Global Data Center Presence: With data centers strategically located worldwide, including cities like Buenos Aires, Sydney, São Paulo, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and New York, Latitude.sh enables horizontal scaling by adding nodes across multiple regions. This distribution enhances redundancy and reduces latency in geographically dispersed networks, ensuring consistent performance and reliability across different locations.
Combined with RAID configurations, these strategies provide a comprehensive redundancy framework, safeguarding against hardware failures and ensuring continuous operation of services.
Resource Allocation Efficiency
Resource allocation fundamentally differs between virtualized and bare metal environments.
Unlike virtual machines that share resources with other tenants, bare metal servers provide dedicated hardware exclusively to one customer. This allocation strategy eliminates the "noisy neighbor" effect that plagues shared environments.
In fact, hardware resource allocation becomes more efficient in bare metal deployments precisely because resources cannot be dynamically adjusted.
This forces organizations to optimize the upfront allocation of CPU, memory, storage, and network bandwidth, ultimately preventing both underutilization and overprovisioning.
For workloads that require consistent performance levels, bare metal servers prove extremely cost-effective despite lacking the on-demand pricing flexibility of VMs.
This efficiency extends to price-performance ratios, with some providers offering up to 74% better CPU performance per dollar spent than competitors.
Consistent Performance During Traffic Spikes
Unexpected traffic surges are the actual test of infrastructure reliability. Thanks to their dedicated resources, bare metal servers maintain consistent performance levels throughout these critical periods.
This consistency proves invaluable for:
E-commerce platforms during flash sales or holiday promotions
Financial services processing high transaction volumes
Media platforms experiencing sudden popularity spikes
MUBI, a curated movie streaming platform, transitioned to Latitude.sh's bare metal servers to enhance its service quality and operational efficiency. This move yielded several significant advantages:
Reduced Latency: MUBI experienced a 300ms latency reduction in Argentina and 200ms in Brazil, leading to faster content delivery and improved user satisfaction.
Cost Savings: The shift resulted in a 35% reduction in infrastructure costs within Brazil, optimizing MUBI's operational expenditures.
Enhanced Streaming Quality: MUBI achieved a 5-point improvement on its Global Performance Indicator, reflecting superior streaming performance.
These improvements underscore the effectiveness of Latitude.sh's tailored bare metal solutions in supporting MUBI's expansion and commitment to delivering high-quality streaming experiences.
Real-World Downtime Success Stories
Real-world case studies provide conclusive evidence of the dramatic difference in reliability between cloud and bare metal implementations across various industries.
Aura: Achieving Zero Outages and Cost Reduction with Latitude.sh
Aura's mission is to provide every individual with secure and private access to global information. However, their operations in Latin America were plagued by frequent outages, averaging five per quarter, leading to numerous user complaints. Seeking a reliable infrastructure partner, Aura turned to Latitude.sh, aiming to enhance network performance and security.
Latitude.sh underwent rigorous performance evaluations set by Aura and met all technical requirements. Beyond technical capabilities, Latitude.sh offered dedicated support, ensuring continuous updates on maintenance and potential downtimes, which provided Aura with peace of mind.
The collaboration yielded remarkable results. Post-implementation, Aura experienced zero outages—significantly improving from the previous average of five per quarter. This stability led to a substantial decrease in user complaints. Additionally, by leveraging Latitude.sh's bandwidth aggregation, Aura streamlined bandwidth tracking across services, resulting in a 40% reduction in infrastructure costs.
Impressed by these outcomes, Aura expanded its partnership with Latitude.sh beyond Latin America into North America, successfully setting up operations in Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This strategic move underscores Aura's confidence in Latitude.sh's ability to deliver reliable, cost-effective infrastructure solutions.
xLabs: Ensuring 100% Uptime with Latitude.sh's Bare Metal Servers
xLabs, a pioneer in the Web3 industry, is Argentina's first Solana validator. Initially, xLabs managed its blockchain nodes on-premises but transitioned to cloud services with providers like AWS and Google Cloud. However, running Solana nodes' high CPU and memory demands made cloud solutions costly and unreliable.
To address these challenges, xLabs adopted a hybrid infrastructure strategy, deploying Solana nodes on Latitude.sh's bare metal servers in Argentina. Several factors influenced this decision:
Cost Efficiency: Bare metal servers offered a more economical solution than public cloud services, aligning with xLabs' budgetary considerations.
Decentralization Support: Positioning nodes in Argentina supported Solana's decentralization efforts, moving away from the concentration in US or European data centers.
Technical Alignment: Latitude.sh's commitment to advancing bare metal infrastructure with cloud-like APIs, SDKs, and automation tools resonated with xLabs' vision for streamlined operations.
The collaboration resulted in xLabs achieving 100% uptime for their Solana nodes, significantly enhancing infrastructure performance. Latitude.sh's robust support and technical expertise have been instrumental in xLabs' mission to build reliable, cost-effective, and decentralized blockchain infrastructure, pushing the boundaries of Web3 technology.
Yes, Your Workload Would Benefit from Bare Metal
Bare metal servers are the clear choice for organizations demanding maximum uptime and reliability.
Through physical isolation, these dedicated servers eliminate the common failure points found in virtualized environments while delivering consistent performance under peak loads.
Evidence from financial services, Web3, gaming, and streaming sectors demonstrates the substantial impact of bare metal infrastructure.
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