What is edge bare metal?

Edge computing is one of the fastest-growing enterprise technologies. But what is it exactly? How does it work? And how can combining edge computing with bare metal servers help organizations optimize their low-latency, high-performance applications?

Edge bare metal: the next evolution in cloud computing

Cloud computing was a game changer for many organizations. It offers faster and more lightweight services for customers and a path for rapid innovation. As companies build and use high-bandwidth apps and services, they want to meet user demands for real-time experiences. Putting data storage and computing power closer to devices or data sources helps improve efficiency and performance.

Edge bare metal is a computing model that utilizes dedicated physical servers, ensuring that each server is exclusively used by one tenant. These servers are strategically placed within a network of interconnected data centers, located where machines and people interact. By processing data at its source, organizations can minimize the distance it travels between devices and users. This approach reduces bandwidth strain on networks while enhancing speed, agility and security—key factors for applications powered by AI, machine learning, and augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR). These technologies are shaping the future of business.

Besides their performance advantages, edge bare metal servers can be provisioned quickly and turned up and down in near real-time to meet changing or short-term business demands. This level of scalability and flexibility can be a strategic advantage for organizations trying to stay ahead of their competitors.

How edge computing compares with cloud computing

Edge computing and cloud computing both offer flexibility, scalability, demand-based capacity management and pay-as-you-go cost predictability. However, there are some key differences between the two approaches.

• Location. When comparing traditional cloud computing with edge computing, the primary difference is how and where data processing takes place. The cloud stores and processes data in a central location, usually a data center. Edge computing processes data nearer the source, at the edge of the network where people and machines connect. This decentralized structure makes it possible to capture and process locally generated data in milliseconds, resulting in a much faster computational speed than cloud computing.
• Resources. Bare metal servers are physical computers dedicated to a single tenant, meaning that other customers do not share compute and storage resources. In a cloud environment, multiple tenants compete for a virtual machine’s memory and processing, potentially reducing performance.
• Efficiency. By eliminating the need for a hypervisor layer, the software that creates and runs virtual machines, bare metal servers offer faster throughput. The operating system runs directly on the server’s hard disk (the ‘bare metal’), helping organizations avoid the loss of performance frequently experienced with cloud or virtual servers.
• Flexibility. Bare metal enables tenants to bring their own operating system and easily customize their machines to meet specific performance, security and reliability needs.
• Security. Physically isolating data, applications and other resources lets customers enjoy a higher degree of privacy and security than the cloud, helping to reduce risk and better support industry-specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Complementary approaches for different needs

A survey of more than 1,700 senior IT decision makers and C-suite executives worldwide revealed that 93 percent of respondents agree that moving their high-performance applications from the cloud to metro edge compute locations will reduce lag time and improve performance.¹  But this doesn’t mean that the edge is a replacement for data centers or the cloud. The edge is another place to run workloads that need more speed and throughput — like when the sheer amount of data is too much to send to the cloud. Or when the lag time created by sending data from the edge to the cloud for processing is too great.

Most organizations will use a mix of edge, public and private cloud environments to handle different computing needs. And edge bare metal delivered as a service will be a key component of this ecosystem.

Edge bare metal powers next-gen business

Single-tenancy edge compute servers offer the speed, security and performance that many enterprises want in a hosted solution. Businesses worldwide have discovered that combining these efficiencies with pay-as-you-go pricing can offer significant infrastructure savings.

That is especially true for industries like healthcare and manufacturing. These fields require compute-intensive, latency-sensitive robotics and machine learning capabilities to streamline day-to-day operations. For example, medical facilities use automated diagnostics and monitoring tools to track patient data and changes in condition. Similarly, factories and warehouses leverage programmable and sensor-based tools for everything from fabrication to predictive maintenance to logistics. And both industries employ streaming and video on-demand services for communication and education.

Of course, big data processing jobs aren’t limited to the health and manufacturing spaces. Many businesses across industries are banking on the consistent uptime, improved customer experiences and enhanced data protection low-latency bare metal provides.

Security companies also rely on the real-time analytical power that bare metal servers deliver for intelligent video surveillance, online fraud detection and speech and image recognition. Likewise, retailers are widely implementing smart technologies like contactless checkouts, automated inventory tracking and customer preference analysis. Financial institutions also demand powerful, dedicated compute to monitor customer spending, perform current market analysis and safeguard sensitive personal data.

The Lumen^® Edge Bare Metal difference

Innovative businesses with growing data demands are turning to dedicated computing solutions to provision fast, secure processing power for their compute-intensive applications. Lumen Edge Bare Metal offers flexible access to a distributed network of high-capacity bare metal servers designed to deliver 5ms or better of latency with improved security, performance and orchestration control already baked into the architecture.

Lumen owns on-demand bare metal locations across North America. They’re all powered by our global fiber network designed to cover 97% of U.S. business demand in <5ms latency. Our pay-as-you-go Edge Bare Metal solution is available over ~350,000 route miles of secure fiber and connects to more than 2,200 third-party public and private data centers.

You can leverage the powerful Lumen Network to build your complete edge computing solution. Combine low-latency Edge Bare Metal with Lumen® Edge Private Cloud and Lumen® Ethernet On-Demand to create an edge ecosystem designed to support all your next-gen apps and services virtually anywhere in the world.

Maximize security, performance and control at the edge with Lumen Edge Bare Metal.

¹ Quadrant Strategies, Global Poll: Edge Computing Trends, Barriers and Benefits, April 2021.

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