Bigstep, a new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has launched in the UK, which uses bare metal power to bring supercomputing speeds to the commercial sector and provides a high performance environment for big data applications.
The IaaS combines bare metal performance with the flexibility of the cloud to create a powerful public computing infrastructure. It aims to allow organisations to process big data faster and more effectively than other means and offers fully self-service bare metal allocation by the hour.
Bigstep is an exclusively bare metal infrastructure that uses the latest generation HP servers and has no hypervisor, which according to industry benchmarks waste up to 40% of the bare metal power of servers. Cloudera has been one of a number of partners involved in the benchmarking and testing of Bigstep.
As Bigstep uses no hypervisor, all switching is also done on physical networking equipment. This improves networking latency, frees up processing resources in the physical servers, and offers direct control over the physical ports in the switch, allowing port-to-port networking. Machines have a maximum connectivity of 44GbE, at wire speed which means that Bigstep provides the fastest networking out of all public clouds, between 44 and 440 times more capacity than that supplied by the current 1Gbps or 100 Mbps uplinks. Due to the lack of a hypervisor, Bigstep is able to provide Cloud-in-Cloud capability which gives users the opportunity to build private clouds on top of the Bigstep infrastructure.
Ioana Hreninciuc, commercial director, Bigstep, said: "Big data demands high powered computing and not using a hypervisor means Bigstep can provide 20-100% more performance per resources than any virtual cloud. We believe we are the most powerful public computing infrastructure in the world and the perfect cloud for any organisation that is serious about crunching its big data in real-time and utilising it to make informed and impactful business decisions."
