OREANDA-NEWS. September 22, 2015. Online, a leading managed service provider (MSP), has selected IBM® (NYSE: IBM) Power Systems™ to extend its service capabilities to Internet clients who want to increase the performance of their bare metal servers in the cloud.

Leading French managed service provider Online today announced it is incorporating IBM Power Systems S822L servers into its bare metal cloud environment.  Designed specifically to handle massive amounts of data, the Power Systems servers, according to Online, enable increased levels of service to clients seeking an alternative to x86 servers on a dedicated cloud platform. (Credit: Online)

A bare metal server is one delivered over the cloud and dedicated completely to a single customer.

Online, a member of the Iliad Group, is using IBM POWER8® S822L servers in its data center in a campaign to attract new clients looking for a variety of services, from web domains to Internet hosting. Online offers clients dedicated infrastructures in order to provide powerful outcomes for a variety of applications and end uses including virtual private servers, databases and high performance computing. 

“With IBMs POWER8-based servers, we can increase our levels of service to clients seeking a dedicated cloud platform alternative to x86 servers,” said S?bastien Cassier, Team Leader, Online. “We wanted to approach the business differently than in the past. The dedicated bare metal Power Systems running Linux differentiate us from other service providers because we can now say that our clients have the opportunity to run the most powerful servers in the world in a native environment for their business needs.”

The IBM POWER8-based servers to be used at Online are based on the first open server platform(1) and the first processor designed for Big Data(2). The bare metal, dedicated systems will be equipped with Power KVM, an open-source virtualization solution used to manage Linux systems, allowing clients the ability to standardize their clouds with a single open-source virtualization technology. The Power Systems S822L servers benefit directly from innovations co-developed by members of the OpenPOWER Foundation – a 150-member global organization of leading technology suppliers and users supporting and contributing to open development on top of POWER’s open architecture.

With Power Systems incorporated into its bare metal environment, Online can have the ability to support more users at a lower cost.  For example, when compared to a similarly configured x86-based server, a Power S822L server can support 1.87 times more MariaDB transactions per minute per core at 40% lower cost(3).

“Today’s cloud service providers require systems that will increase the performance for their existing clients as well as attract new clients with alternatives to x86,” said Doug Balog, General Manager, IBM Power Systems. “Power Systems can give MSPs like Online a more cost effective and powerful solution than an x86 environment for customers analyzing and managing massive amounts of data in the cloud.”

Deploying IBM Power System S822L servers, Online will look to attract larger enterprise-class clients by offering a dedicated physical POWER8-based server to effectively manage and meet the demands of the staggering amounts of data that clients, large and small, face each day. With the help of IBM POWER8 dedicated servers, Online clients will have the ability to gain fast insights to data, in a security-rich cloud environment.

To order or find out more about Online’s Power Systems bare metal offering, visit: http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-power8 .

About Online

Since 1999, Online has provided hosting services for Internet stakeholders of all sizes, worldwide. Today they are one of the leading Web hosting providers, hosting several hundred thousand Interface sites in three datacenters. Online offers a range of services including domain names, Web hosting, dedicated servers and hosting in datacenters.

(1) By “first open server platform" , this means that the IBM POWER server is the first server that has made its systems, processor, and chip design and architecture fully available to an open development alliance, the OpenPOWER Foundation, for comprehensive licensing and collaborative design allowing third parties to co-innovate.

(2) By Big Data, IBM means handling both extraordinary large volumes of structured (relational databases) and unstructured (noSQL, Map Reduce) data from which customers derive analytics and insight. The POWER 8 processor is the first processor with differentiated capabilities designed to handle both structured and unstructured data.  Such capabilities include:

  1. the CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) Architecture with key data capabilities e.g.: a). CAPI Flash Access Efficiency, b). Storage reduction via CAPI Attached Compression Accelerator, and c). Throughput and latency advantage of CAPI Attached Mellanox RDMA Fabric.
  2. DBMA  (dynamic balanced memory architecture) in the form of key capabilities, e.g. a). Internal Processor Data Flow  b). Memory Bandwidth advantage c). Cache capacity advantage

(3) Results are based on IBM internal testing  of comparatively configured single system image systems running Sysbench OLTP version.05 @ 32M and are current as of May 29, 2015. Performance improvement figures are based on multiple G2 processes running a 32 million record workload . Individual results will vary depending on individual workloads, configurations and conditions. IBM Power System S822L; 20 cores / 160 threads, POWER8; 3.4GHz, 128 GB memory, MariaDB 10.1, RHEL 7.1, RHEV  compared to an Intel x86 system with 20 cores / 40 threads; Intel E5-2660 v3; 2.6 GHz; 128 GB; , MariaDB 10.1, RHEL 7.1, RHEV