Data center services provider SoftLayer has added to its portfolio of cloud-computing services an offering that enables customers to provision dedicated physical servers through a cloud-like buying and billing process. The offering omits the use of a hypervisor - which normally takes up some capacity - and allows applications to access the physical hardware directly.

The Bare Metal Cloud offering has all the typical components of a cloud service: on-demand scalability through an interface accessible through either a private or a public network; an open API and a pay-as-you-go billing model.

While hypervisors allow for greater flexibility, speed of provisioning and added capabilities like VM instance snapshots, "not every single workload is well suited to run on top of hypervisors," SoftLayer CTO Nathan Day said, explaining that some clients prefer to omit paying the "hypervisor tax." Examples of such workloads would be data bases and calculation-intensive applications.

"They (some clients) really liked the idea of hourly billing but didn't want to deal with a hypervisor. We realized that we had the technology and the infrastructure to support (an offering that provides that)."

SoftLayer, based in Plano, Texas, owns and operates three data centers in Dallas, Texas, Seattle, Wash., and Washington, D.C. Currently housing 21,000 servers, the three facilities can support up to 12,000 racks or 48,000 servers. The company has already been leveraging its infrastructure to provide a range of traditional cloud-based services that do involve hypervisor-enabled virtualization.

The vendor bills clients for Bare Metal Cloud machines on a monthly or on an hourly basis, providing two-core, four-core, eight-core and 16-core options, each coming with 250 Gb of storage. RAM size varies from option to option.

Announcement of the new offering's availability came five days after SoftLayer announced successful financing of $20 million of senior notes by a private investment group. The transaction was facilitated by investment banking firm DH Capital, which acted as SoftLayer's financial advisor. The company said it would use the new capital to fund continued growth.