Rackspace Hosting has announced an OnMetal Cloud Server service for clients which could offer faster raw performance than virtual machines.

OnMetal Cloud Servers are built with Open Compute Project specified hardware and powered by OpenStack.

The servers come in three different sets of specifications commonly associated with large web scale applications.

The compute-optimised configuration – with 20 threads and 32GB RAM – is for large-scale web servers, application servers, queue processors and load balancers.

The Memory-optimized configuration has 24 threads and 512GB RAM and is for power caches, search indexes and in-memory analytics.

The I/O-optimized configuration has 40 threads, 128GB RAM and a 3.2Terabyte PCIe flash drive.

This is for running large NoSQL data stores, traditional SQL databases and online transaction processing applications.

Rackspace is marketing it as an application performance interface (API) driven single-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering.

The service option is designed to appeal to customers who want the raw power of a bare metal infrastructure (where processing power is unconstrained by a layer of operating software) but do not want to sacrifice the speed at which virtual machines can be provisioned.

Rackspace described the service as one that combines the agility and elasticity of the cloud along with the simplicity and performance of colocation.

The new offering is a response to the increasingly common data center phenomenon of ‘noisy neighbours’, it said.

Customers in multi-tenant environments can find their performance impaired as network latency, disk Input-output and processing power are affected by the toll of operating software and hypervisors.

Since these factors can combine to create unpredictable conditions for application performance, the hosting company said it has created a way to ring fence tenants and configure a set up that uses the full power of the platforms.

Rackspace said it has used its expertise to eliminate the pain points typically associated with the current, predominant model.

“Virtualization and sharing a physical machine are fantastic tools for specific workloads at certain scale but the one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work once you become successful,” Rackspace president Taylor Rhodes said.

"So we created OnMetal to simplify scaling for customers to stay lean and fast with a laser-sharp focus on building out their product.”

Bare metal with an API creates the benefits of cloud infrastructures without the compromises on performance or reliability, said Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS.

“You get a host operating system optimised for efficiency and ready to run your container-based applications from first boot,” Polvi said.