Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates from Canonical and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

Thank you for contacting our team. We will be in touch shortly.Close

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Canonical
on 27 March 2017

Bare metal server provisioning is evolving the HPC market


 

In the early days of High Performance Computing (HPC), ‘Big Data’ was just called ‘Data’ and organizations spent millions of dollars to buy mainframes or large data processing/warehousing systems just to gain incremental improvements in the manipulation of information. Today, IT Pros and systems administrators are under more pressure than ever to make the most of these legacy bare metal hardware investments. However, with more and more compute workloads moving to the public cloud, and the natural pressure to do more with less, IT pros are finding it difficult to find balance with existing infrastructure and the new realities of the cloud.  Until now, these professionals have not found the balance needed to achieve more efficiency while using what they already have in-house.

Businesses have traditionally made significant investments in hardware. However, as the cloud has disrupted traditional business models, IT Pros needed to find a way to combine the flexibility of the cloud with the power and security of their bare metal servers or internal hardware infrastructure. Canonical’s MAAS (Metal as a Service) solution allows IT organizations to discover, commission, and (re)deploy bare metal servers within most operating system environments like Windows, Linux, etc.. As new services and applications are deployed, MAAS can be used to dynamically re-allocate physical resources to match workload requirements. This means organizations can deploy both virtual and physical machines across multiple architectures and virtual environments, at scale.

MAAS improves the lives of IT Pros!

MAAS was designed to make complex hardware deployments faster, more efficient, and with more flexibility. One of the key areas where MAAS has found significant success is in High Performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data. HPC relies on aggregating computing power to solve large data-centric problems in subjects like banking, healthcare, engineering, business, science, etc. Many large organizations are leveraging MAAS to modernize their OS deployment toolchain (a set of tool integrations that support the development, deployment, operations tasks) and lower server provisioning times.

These organizations found their tools were outdated thereby prohibiting them from deploying large numbers of servers. Server deployments were slow, modular/monolithic, and could not integrate with tools, drivers, and APIs. By deploying MAAS they were able to speedup their server deployment times as well as integrate with their orchestration platform and configuration management tools like Chef, Ansible, and Puppet, or software modeling solutions like Canonical’s Juju.

For example, financial institutions are using MAAS to deploy Windows servers in their data centre during business hours to support applications and employee systems. Once the day is done, they use MAAS to redeploy the data centre server infrastructure to support Ubuntu Servers and perform batch processing and transaction settlement for the day’s activities. In the traditional HPC world, these processes would take days or weeks to perform, but with MAAS, these organizations are improving their efficiency, reduce infrastructure costs by using existing hardware, while giving these institutions the ability to close out the day’s transitions faster and more efficiently thus giving financial executives the ability to spend more time with their families and having bragging rights at cocktail parties.

HPC is just one great use cases for MAAS where companies can recognize immediate value from their bare metal hardware investments. Over the next weeks we will go deeper into the various use cases for MAAS, but in the meantime, we invite you to try MAAS for yourself on any of the major public clouds using Conjure Up.

If you would like to learn more about MAAS or see a demo, contact us directly.

Related posts


Anton Smith
8 October 2021

Provisioning bare metal Kubernetes clusters with Spectro Cloud and MAAS

Cloud and server Article

Bare metal Kubernetes (K8s) is now easier than ever. Spectro Cloud has recently posted an article about integrating Kubernetes with MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service. In the article, they describe how they have created a provider for the Kubernetes Cluster API for Canonical MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service).  This blog describes briefly the benefits of ba ...


Bill Wear
10 December 2020

MAAS 2.9 is now available

Ubuntu MAAS

Canonical is happy to announce that MAAS 2.9 is now available. We’ll get to the details of installing it in just a moment, but first, let’s walk through a brief overview of the new features and fixes. Later on in this post, we’ll cover some of these features in much more detail. New features & ...


Bill Wear
8 December 2020

MAAS CLI-only machine deployment

Ubuntu MAAS

Continuing in our series on CLI-only MAAS operation, it’s time to deploy machines. In the previous post, we reached the point of creating and commissioning machines, using only the MAAS CLI. Moving forward, there are two key steps: acquiring machines, and then deploying them. Let’s take a look Acquiring a machine using the CLI When ...