Uptime with DCK: Can’t kill the Metal

The Data Center Podcast

In the latest episode of Uptime with Data Center Knowledge, we look at the evolution of bare metal servers. To find out more about the subject, we chat to bothers Jacob and Zachary Smith – co-founders of Packet, a bare metal hosting service that was acquired by data center giant Equinix in 2020, in a deal worth $335 million. Packet became the foundation of the new Equinix Metal business, led by Zac as its managing director, and Jacob – as the VP of bare metal strategy and marketing Correction: Soon after we recorded this episode, Zac was promoted to head of edge infrastructure services at Equinix, and Jacob – to interim lead of the digital services go-to-market. According to the Smiths, the key attractions of bare metal are speed and performance: Equinix Metal can be set up in any supported facility in as little as 15 minutes, to run almost any workload on dedicated, physical servers. The process is considerably different from handling servers used to run public cloud applications, where the hardware is often shared between multiple users. Jacob himself jokes that “no one really cares about servers” – but there are plenty of applications that benefit from bare metal, especially in organizations that value automation and are heavily invested in custom software stacks. For such customers, bare metal represents choice – a dedicated server is a blank canvas, unburdened by multiple layers of complex software that enables typical cloud workloads. The customer alone will decide what the machine will do, and how it will do it. We also discuss: • Open Source software development at Equinix • Why Equinix Metal doesn’t manage Kubernetes • How to improve sustainability at the server level