Bare metal servers in data-intensive applications

Data is arguably the most critical asset in today’s world. It’s no surprise that many companies invest heavily in collecting and analyzing it—preferably on bare metal servers.

By the end of this article, you will understand why running data analytics on large datasets performs significantly better on dedicated servers. Although widely used, the public cloud simply doesn’t offer the ultimate performance or reliability needed for this type of activity.

Big data security

When managing vast amounts of data, the first priority is ensuring secure storage and processing. Even minor failures can have catastrophic consequences, particularly for industries like healthcare and banking. 

To safeguard their data, companies typically consider two primary approaches.

One option is to use on-premises servers, where the company owns and manages its infrastructure. This approach provides full control over who accesses and retrieves the data, but it comes with substantial costs and operational challenges. 

Servers demand constant maintenance, updates, and specialized expertise to remain functional and secure. For many businesses, this level of investment may not be feasible, especially when balanced against the resources required to maintain this level of reliability.

The alternative is usually private cloud solutions, particularly bare metal servers, where a third-party provider handles the digital infrastructure. 

Bare metal servers are single-tenant environments, which means all of a server’s resources are dedicated exclusively to your workload. 

Unlike the public cloud, there are no noisy neighbors competing for resources, ensuring that your data analytics run as efficiently and securely as possible.

Beyond the performance benefits, bare metal servers from top-tier providers like Latitude.sh offer enhanced security. With a single-tenant server, no one interacts with your infrastructure without your explicit knowledge. 

Big data storage

Storing big data is a challenge that requires more than just an ordinary setup. With businesses generating terabytes—or even petabytes—of data daily, traditional storage systems simply cannot keep up with this information's volume, velocity, and complexity. 

Big data is often stored in specialized infrastructures designed to handle its unique demands, such as distributed file systems, object storage, and high-performance servers.

The reason basic computers struggle to store and manage large amounts of data lies in their inherent limitations. Standard consumer-grade systems lack the capacity, processing power, and fault tolerance necessary for managing such immense workloads. 

For example, storing terabytes of data on a regular computer would quickly overwhelm its hard drive and RAM, while its processor would lag when processing data-intensive queries. 

Additionally, standard systems are not equipped to handle redundancy or ensure data integrity at the scale required for big data applications.

This is where bare metal servers provide a game-changing solution. Bare metal servers offer the raw performance, scalability, and reliability needed for efficient big data storage. 

With no virtualization overhead, these single-tenant servers dedicate all their resources—CPU, memory, and storage—to a single workload. This ensures faster data processing and a seamless flow of operations, even when dealing with massive datasets.

Furthermore, bare metal servers are highly customizable, allowing businesses to tailor the storage configurations to their specific needs. 

Providers like Latitude.sh support modern storage technologies like the latest generation of NVMe drives and DDR5 memory for blazing-fast access to frequently used data, as well as scalable architectures. 

The single-tenant nature of bare metal also enhances data security, ensuring that no other entity shares the server’s resources or compromises its performance.

Big data architecture

Now you know how bare metal servers can help when it comes to security and storage, which are two of the most important aspects of keeping your data safe and accessible.

So, let’s dive a little deeper into big data architecture and why it requires so much raw power to process datasets properly.

Understanding Big Data Architecture

Big data architecture refers to the framework and technologies designed to handle, store, and process massive datasets. These datasets are often too large, fast, or complex for traditional systems to manage. 

To fully understand why raw power is essential, it's important to grasp the key components of big data architecture and how they work together.

At its core, big data architecture has three main stages: data ingestion, data storage, and data processing.

Data Ingestion

This is the process of collecting data from various sources, such as IoT devices, social media, customer transactions, or sensors. 

The challenge here is that big data is often unstructured (like videos, images, or emails), semi-structured (such as JSON files or logs), or structured (like databases). 

Additionally, it arrives at incredible speeds, often referred to as "data streams," making it difficult for basic systems to keep up.

Bare metal servers excel in this stage because of their ability to handle high-bandwidth connections and parallel data streams without bottlenecks. 

For example, larger instances with the proper specs can process millions of events per second without lag, ensuring that no valuable information is lost in transit.

Data Storage

Efficient data storage is essential for both long-term archival and real-time access, where scalability and reliability are key considerations. 

Traditional systems often encounter challenges in managing petabytes of data while ensuring redundancy, backups, and efficient retrieval.

Big data storage solutions typically leverage both distributed filesystems, such as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and object storage systems. 

Each approach plays a crucial role depending on the nature of the workload and data requirements.

Filesystem storage, like HDFS, excels in managing structured and semi-structured data. It offers scalability, redundancy, and seamless integration with batch-oriented frameworks such as Hadoop and Apache Spark. 

By distributing large datasets into blocks across multiple nodes, it ensures durability and fault tolerance, making it a reliable choice for data-intensive workflows.

Object storage, on the other hand, is highly versatile and optimized for unstructured data, making it a go-to solution for both archival and real-time applications. 

Its ability to scale horizontally, store metadata, and integrate with modern data processing frameworks like Apache Flink and Apache Kafka makes it ideal for real-time analytics and event-driven architectures.

Kubernetes further enhances the landscape by enabling microservices-based applications to share clusters for batch and real-time processing. 

It simplifies deployment and management compared to traditional Hadoop clusters while supporting a wide range of data processing tools.

Bare metal servers provide the robust foundation needed for these storage systems, offering high-capacity solutions with advanced options like NVMe and SSDs for speed, combined with RAID configurations for redundancy. 

Unlike virtualized environments, bare metal ensures consistent and reliable performance even during peak loads.

When choosing a storage and processing framework, both filesystem and object storage are equally important. 

Filesystem storage is indispensable for batch-oriented workflows and historical analysis, while object storage is critical for real-time, unstructured, and event-driven use cases. 

A hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both can maximize scalability, performance, and flexibility, making it possible to meet diverse business and technical requirements effectively.

Data Processing

This is where the raw power of bare metal servers truly shines. Processing big data involves transforming raw information into meaningful insights. 

Techniques like batch processing (handling large chunks of data at once) or real-time processing (analyzing data as it arrives) require immense computational resources. 

Machine learning models, predictive analytics, and visualization tools are often applied during this stage, demanding high CPU and GPU performance, extensive RAM, and fast storage access.

For example, analyzing customer behavior in e-commerce or detecting fraudulent transactions in banking might involve billions of data points that need to be processed in milliseconds. 

Bare metal servers, with their unparalleled computing capacity and ability to accommodate the most advanced GPUs, are perfectly suited for these high-intensity tasks.

Why Raw Power is Essential

Big data’s three defining characteristics—volume, velocity, and variety—make raw computational power a necessity. 

Large volumes of data require significant storage capacity. High-velocity streams demand rapid processing speeds to keep up with real-time data. The variety of data formats, from text to multimedia, requires flexible and robust systems capable of handling diverse workloads simultaneously.

Traditional systems often falter under these demands due to resource-sharing, latency issues, and limited scalability. 

Bare metal servers, on the other hand, eliminate virtualization overhead, dedicating all resources to the workload at hand. This ensures faster processing, better reliability, and the ability to scale as datasets grow exponentially.

The Role of Bare Metal in Big Data Success

By leveraging bare metal servers, businesses can design big data architectures that are secure, scalable, and optimized for performance. 

From managing data ingestion pipelines to processing and storing data efficiently, bare metal servers provide the stability and power required to turn massive datasets into actionable insights. 

Whether it’s a healthcare company analyzing patient records or a streaming platform personalizing user experiences, the raw computational strength of bare metal servers enables the seamless operation of big data solutions.

In summary, big data architecture is complex and resource-intensive, but with the right infrastructure—like bare metal servers—it becomes manageable and efficient. 

By understanding the demands of big data, companies can make informed decisions that allow them to extract maximum value from their information.

Scalability and future-proofing in big data

One of the defining features of big data is its relentless growth. The datasets businesses manage today are enormous, but they pale in comparison to what will be required in the future. 

As industries become increasingly data-driven, scalability becomes not just an option but a necessity.

Why Scalability Matters

Big data isn’t static—it grows exponentially. New data sources are constantly emerging, from IoT devices generating sensor data to social media platforms producing billions of interactions daily. 

Companies must plan for this growth to ensure their infrastructure can handle increasing demands without slowing down or becoming obsolete.

For example, an e-commerce company managing customer purchase histories might need to scale its storage and processing capabilities during holiday seasons when transaction volumes surge. 

Without a scalable system, performance bottlenecks could lead to slower checkout times, dissatisfied customers, and lost revenue.

How bare metal servers enable scalability

Bare metal servers are uniquely positioned to support scalability in big data environments:

Many big data solutions, such as Hadoop or Apache Spark, are designed to run on clusters of servers, for instance. 

Bare metal infrastructure enables smooth integration, allowing businesses to expand their clusters without worrying about resource contention.

The rapid pace of technological advancement means today’s solutions may not meet tomorrow’s challenges. Bare metal servers offer a level of adaptability that ensures long-term relevance:

Many organizations use a combination of on-premises, cloud, and bare metal servers. This hybrid approach allows businesses to move workloads dynamically as demands shift, providing flexibility for future needs.

Companies that can grow their infrastructure seamlessly are better positioned to capitalize on new opportunities, whether that’s entering new markets, launching innovative products, or responding to customer demands in real-time.

With bare metal servers, businesses can scale confidently, knowing they have a robust and future-proof foundation that will support their growth, no matter how massive their datasets become.

Latency and performance in big data processing

Big data operations hinge on the ability to process, analyze, and retrieve information at blazing speeds. 

Whether it’s predictive analytics, real-time decision-making, or machine learning workloads, latency and performance are two critical factors that determine the success of a big data architecture.

Latency refers to the delay between a user’s action or request and the system’s response. In big data workflows, latency can have a domino effect, disrupting processes and delaying results. For example:

• Real-Time Analytics: Stock market trading platforms analyze millions of transactions in milliseconds. A latency delay could mean the difference between profit and loss.

• Customer Experience: Streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify use real-time analytics to personalize recommendations. High latency could slow down this process, leading to a poor user experience.

• Critical Systems: In healthcare or emergency response systems, latency can have life-altering consequences, such as delayed diagnostics or alerts.

As datasets grow, the risk of latency increases. Handling terabytes or petabytes of data efficiently requires an infrastructure designed for speed and low-latency performance.

To understand the real-world impact of bare metal servers, consider a company running real-time fraud detection algorithms. With bare metal, they can process thousands of transactions per second without delay, a feat that might be hindered in public cloud setups due to shared resources and potential lags. 

Similarly, a media company leveraging big data for video transcoding can significantly reduce encoding times with bare metal servers, streamlining production timelines and boosting efficiency.

By placing servers closer to where data is generated or consumed, businesses can drastically minimize delays. Providers like Latitude.sh offer geographically distributed data centers specifically designed to address this need.

Additionally, caching solutions and edge computing capabilities enable bare metal servers to store frequently accessed data near the processor, cutting down retrieval times and ensuring quicker responses.

Performance in big data processing isn’t just about speed—it’s a critical business differentiator. In a competitive and data-driven world, companies that can analyze and act on information faster gain a decisive edge. 

Real-time insights, optimized operations, and seamless user experiences all depend on infrastructure that can handle the demands of big data. 

With bare metal servers, businesses gain unparalleled power, speed, and reliability, ensuring that their systems not only meet the demands of today but stay ahead of the curve. 

This raw performance transforms infrastructure from a supporting role into a driving force for innovation and success.

Latitude.sh is ready for your workloads, no matter how much computing power you need. Create a free account and see for yourself.