
OnMetal Performance In Early Benchmarks - jayofdoom
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/onmetal-shows-phenomenal-performance-in-early-benchmarks/
======
jderekw
SoftLayer has been doing this since 2006 and also offers virtual compute
instances as well. Can be purchased hourly or monthly

[http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers](http://www.softlayer.com/bare-
metal-servers)

~~~
old-gregg
I've been SL customer and have using that prior to joining Rackspace and
building OnMetal. The point isn't about "lets get rid of hypervisor", the
point was to:

* Lets provision as quickly as VMs (as opposed to 1hr+ on SL)

* Lets engineer hardware to deliver maximum uptime via no-moving-parts design (as opposed to vanilla SuperMicro on SL)

* Lets design hardware to deliver maximum unit of work per dollar (like DB transactions/second per dollar, or requests/second/dollar) as opposed to average value elsewhere.

* Deriving from the above, lets just give RAM away nearly for free, and put dual 10Gig network in place, because modern apps should be mostly RAM-based.

* Lets adopt standard OpenStack provisioning API, with myriad of pre-existing tools, community and ecosystem (like auto-scaling, orchestration, etc) as opposed to proprietary API.

The end result is a completely different infrastructure, something akin to
what OpenCompute pioneers use internally. This is how running at scale should
be like.

As always, I encourage skeptics to spend more than 10 seconds on a product
page, because most of the time there're humans behind it, and - in this case
for sure - they are way too ambitious to be spending their lives simply
cloning old designs.

Enjoy OnMetal, dear jberekw, it's built for critical thinkers (and skeptics!
:-) like you and it's awesome - it's going to rock your world.

~~~
oasisbob
The pricing (on the compute flavor especially) is appealing -- can certainly
see uses for it.

Looking forward to OnMetal being available in other regions, especially ORD.

I'm one of the skeptics -- but that's because I've had very few problems with
Rackspace cloud instance performance in general; rather, it's the control
plane reliability which has caused 99% of the pain.

As an aside, I find the Cloud Servers SLA disappointing, as it defines control
plane availability as 1 – (Total API Errors)/(Total Valid API Requests) .
Can't launch instances on Super Bowl Sunday? Tough. The failed POSTs to
/servers will never trigger a violation, so long as GET /servers is working:

[http://www.rackspace.com/information/legal/cloud/sla](http://www.rackspace.com/information/legal/cloud/sla)

Most SLAs remedies are weak ("we break the SLA you get a free t-shirt"), but
this one is broken to the point of glossing over fundamental outages.

~~~
snewman
Agreed -- SLAs are a pet peeve of mine. I wrote a post [0] about this a few
years ago, it still feels fairly current. Basically, I don't think SLAs are a
useful tool for managing service provider relationships; it's too difficult to
capture nuance in a legal document. Transparency and track records seem like a
more realistic approach. We've been seeing some movement here, but not much.
Most service providers offer very little hard data about historical
performance, and don't say enough about their internal operations to let you
make a realistic assessment of disaster probabilities.

[0] [http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/04/slas-
considered-h...](http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/04/slas-considered-
harmful.html)

------
ColinCera
As near as I can figure, the OnMetal servers are 3x-5x what I'd pay for
dedicated servers from, say, a Hurricane reseller, and the virtual servers are
more than 2x as much as comparable Linode servers, with the Linode servers
offering way more SSD storage, more bandwidth, etc.

Not to mention, Rackspace charges you $120 per terabyte of data transfer,
while you'll get several terabytes of transfer free/included when buying from
Linode or most dedicated server resellers.

That seems like a hefty premium for...what? The Rackspace name? Is there any
reason to believe that Rackspace has better uptime/reliability than Linode?
Any reason to believe Rackspace has better hardware than Linode? Given that
neither company — as with most cloud providers — provides any truly meaningful
transparency, it's impossible to say.

For my money, I _think_ I'd rather spend less of it, or spend the same amount
and get more/redundant servers.

I'm genuinely struggling to understand the value of Rackspace.

~~~
quacker
_I 'm genuinely struggling to understand the value of Rackspace._

See [1]: "We don't offer raw infrastructure without service." That is, support
is included in the cost. Lots of people don't need support or don't want to
pay for it, particularly the startup-oriented crowd here on HN. But I would be
interested in a comparison of Rackspace's support to others'.

 _Rackspace charges you $120 per terabyte of data transfer_

Is this in the fine print somewhere? I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't see
it mentioned in [1].

1:
[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/)

~~~
ColinCera
Actually, I didn't notice that support was required. I was basing my cost
comparisons on Rackspaces's "Raw Infrastructure" pricing — the fact you are
required to purchase support at additional cost makes their pricing even less
competitive.

They have a more detailed pricing page, with bandwidth charges listed near the
bottom, here:
[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/)

~~~
superuser2
>I was basing my cost comparisons on Rackspaces's "Raw Infrastructure" pricing

As parent clearly stated, there _is_ no raw infrastructure pricing; all
pricing includes support already.

~~~
ColinCera
Perhaps you should pay a visit to the link parent posted, so you would
understand what I was talking about.

[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/)

Where they present their pricing in the format of a "Raw Infrastructure" price
plus your choice of 2 different levels of support. So, there _is_ raw
infrastructure pricing — if you'd visited the page before posting, you'd have
known that's where I got the nomenclature in the first place — but you must
also purchase some form of support (where the pricing varies for different
support levels).

------
snewman
I want to want this, but the pricing just doesn't seem competitive with EC2.
Am I missing something?

For example, compare the "I/O" server with an EC2 i2.4xlarge instance. The
Rackspace server has 128GB RAM, 3.2TB disk, and 20 cores; i2.4xlarge has
122GB, 3.2TB, and 16 -- nearly comparable.

On EC2, I can buy a 3-year Light Utilization Reserved Instance for $3884, and
then pay $828/month (based on 720 hours per month). After 12 months, my
average cost has been $1152/month. I still have two years left on my
reservation, which I can keep using, or possibly sell, so the effective cost
is even lower.

If I'm more certain of a 12-month server lifetime, I can buy a 1-year Heavy
Utilization Reserved Instance for $7280, and then pay $447/month, for a total
cost of $1054/month.

On Rackspace, list price is $1800/month. Suppose my total spend is
$10,000/month (list price) and I commit to 12 months. I get a 15% discount, or
$1530/month. That's quite a bit more expensive than EC2, and with EC2 I'm
committing less up front. A longer commitment would help, but it would also
bring down the EC2 price.

Can anyone poke holes in my analysis?

~~~
hyperliner
You are not too far off. I would use 730 hours = 365 * 24 / 12 instead of 720.
You could add little (or not so little) things like the cost of IOPS,
bandwidth differential, etc. You could add a little more for the core diffs.
But all that won't close the gap.

Regardless, if you want the cheapest, I would go with Digital Ocean, though it
is a different kind of hosting. For Rackspace, you really go when you need
their support people and not just a server.

I hear a lot more developers this year going to DO than last year, but I have
never used them though, trying to stick with the "devil I know."

~~~
snewman
Digital Ocean is interesting, but they don't really come out cheaper for
large, continuous-duty instances. Their tiny servers look great, if you don't
need much storage. But on the larger instances, it's a straight $1/GB/month
for SSD. With some commitment, Rackspace is more like $0.50, and Amazon around
$0.35.

Digital Ocean looks roughly comparable to Amazon for RAM, and slightly ahead
on price-per-core (if you assume all cores are equal), but way behind on SSD.
Again, this is assuming you want large instances and are going to run them
24/7 for at least 6 to 12 months -- otherwise, DO pricing starts to look a lot
better.

------
brendangregg
SysBench is ok when used properly, but UnixBench?

They provide instructions on how you can patch and run it, using "./Run", but
no warnings about what this is actually doing. See
[http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-02/compilers-
love-m...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-02/compilers-love-messing-
with-benchmarks.html) . I'd like to write a lot more about UnixBench, but I
really don't have the time. It takes a lot of energy to refute this stuff.

If I were benchmarking OnMetal vs HW virt, I'd be showing a spectrum of micro-
benchmarks, from equal performance (CPU) to network I/O. I'd expect some of my
results to show a ~10x difference. You would then choose/weight them depending
on what matters for your intended application.

------
cmsj
Still not seen a discussion of how they are dealing with the huge security
nightmare of direct customer hardware access.

~~~
old-gregg
What makes you think it's "huge"? How do you think the dedicated hosting
industry has been operating for more than a decade? You can re-flush the bios,
you can secure-erase the storage, etc.

~~~
cmsj
Just because the dedicated server hosting industry hasn't been dealing with
the problem, doesn't mean it's not there :)

If I flash the BIOS (or the network card firmware or the LOM device firmware
or the disk controller firmware or the individual disk firmware, etc) with
malicious firmware, it can lie to you when you try to reflash it later,
leaving my malicious code running against later customers.

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mrinterweb
The pricing of OnMetal appears relatively competitive if not on the expensive
side. I think the best way to make the case that OnMetal is worth the premium
is with a series of system benchmarks comparing their solution to comparably
priced AWS instances.

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tszming
So is rackspace now giving up the virtualized cloud market? (Because I
remember they didn't follow the recent price drop of Google/AWS/Azure?)

------
abrahamrhoffman
Wanna see if we can salt-call the servers to spin-up on demand. O_o

~~~
jayofdoom
If it can do it for normal Rackspace Cloud instances, it can do it for OnMetal
instances.

