HPE teams with PhoenixNAP for bare metal cloud offerings

IT cloud services provider PhoenixNAP is expanding its bare metal cloud offerings by deploying HPE ProLiant servers with Ampere’s Arm-based server processors rather than x86 chips.

Ampere, the chip startup founded by former Intel executive Renee James, makes Arm-based server processors specifically for cloud use. It doesn’t use multithreading in its chips, unlike Intel and AMD, because it feels performance is not consistent across threads. Rather, it goes for core count, delivering chips that have 80 to 128 cores.

The new server, the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11, is a cloud-native server designed for service providers and enterprises. HPE says it offers improved compute performance and energy savings over x86 systems.

As customers move to PhoenixNAP’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, “it’s critical that we provide the performance and energy efficiency for data-intensive workloads at a time-to-market that matches our customers’ expectations,” said Ian McClarty, president of PhoenixNAP, in a statement.

HPE has a history of Arm server products going back to Project Mooonshot a decade ago. In June 2022, HPE became the first major server provider to offer cloud-native servers based on the Ampere Altra line of Arm-based processors.

PhoenixNAP has 18 data center locations across five continents. The company says the HPE servers will improve PhoenixNAP’s ability to support AI inferencing, cloud gaming, and other cloud-native workloads. One of its specialties is bare-metal servers.

Bare metal servers are basically virtual machines with no operating environment. You select the number of cores, memory, storage, and networking bandwidth, and the hardware is provisioned for you, but you have to bring your own operating system, platform, and operating environment.

It’s a fast growing market. The global bare metal cloud is expected to reach $16.4 billion by 2026, up from $4.5 billion in 2020, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 24.1%, according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. The bare metal market is expected to grow across SMBs and enterprises alike.