by nickgardener

One Doc, All the Answers – Bare Metal with THG ICS

All the questions we get asked about Bare Metal Servers, answered in one place!

This is a document for those who want to get straight to the point. You know what Bare Metal is, you’re looking to stand up more servers, you’re scouting out providers, and you want to jump straight into the details.

So, whether you want to ask about locations and pricing, to multiple carriers, support agreements, and performance comparisons to public cloud and hyperscalers, this blog will have up-front answers to the most popular questions we get asked, after 20 years of hosting enterprise grade Bare Metal servers.

And if there’s anything we don’t cover here, or if one of our answers really catches your eye, then our account managers will be happy to talk further one to one!

Contents- Click a question!

Locations

Servers, CPUS, Carriers

ICS vs Hyperscalers, Integration with Public Cloud

Support & Account Management

Bandwidth & Billing

Still have questions?

Locations

How Many Locations Can You Offer?

We have 36 data center locations worldwide, with 11 key locations being connected by a private internet backbone for enhanced global connectivity. This includes-

Europe- London, Manchester, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris

North America – Dallas, Salt Lake City, New York City, Houston, Seattle, Toronto, Montreal

AsiaPac – Singapore, Chennai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Melbourne

34 of our Data Centres are Tier 3, with the remainder being Tier 2.

How Quickly can you deploy servers?

Fast – typically, deployment times range from a couple of hours, to within a day or two. We never have an issue procuring more racks or more components when needed either; we can buy better hardware with quicker delivery times in comparison to our competitors thanks to having excellent relationships with leading tech partners via our connection to The Hut Group (THG).

Servers, CPUs, Carriers

What CPUs do you provide? Can you provide AMD? 

We have set up servers with nearly every type of CPU available on the market, and we now also offer AMD, which has been a big hit with our customers.

We can get you any CPUs you might want, from the Intel E series all the way up to AMD Epics, and anything in between.

What if I want a custom-built server?

The Hut Group (THG) primarily an eccomerce technology business relies heavily on our own IT infrastructure, to power our websites and ingenuity customers. We are constantly expanding our global presence and investing heavily in improving our infrastucture.

Due to the size of THG we have excellent relationships with suppliers and server manufacturers. The result is we can pass time and cost savings on to our customers.

Which Carriers do you work with?

We work with multiple Tier 1 carriers – Cogent, Zayo, Lumen, and GTT – to ensure that our datacentres have multiple diversified sources of connectivity.

Can you provide diversification of Data Centers and Service Providers?

THG ICS offer diversified data center and carrier networks for customers who want to avoid single points of failure in their infrastructure.

We build hosting solutions that use multiple DCs, providers, and platforms to add extra resilience and that extra level of consistency.

ICS vs Hyperscalers, Integration with Public Cloud

How do you compare to Hyperscalers and Public Cloud?

Public Cloud providers like AWS, Oracle, Google Cloud and Azure offer a range of scalable cloud instances that are more flexible than traditional Bare Metal.

However, Bare Metal hardware is

  • More Powerful
  • Provides dedicated resource
  • And is more cost effective than hyperscaler and public cloud offerings, with egress charges being typically 5-6x cheaper than public cloud alternatives.

In addition to this Cloud billing can fluctuate due to many different factors, including traffic, RAM usage, and higher bandwidth requirements, which can cause billing to be unpredictable and costly.

Bare Metal provides predictable, flexible billing that allows businesses to know what they’re paying for their infrastructure at the end of the month. They also have better, faster performance than cloud environments due to the absence of virtualization layers. It’s a more direct route to computing, and ideal for workloads that require high performance computing (HPC) or dedicated hardware.

In addition to this, we can also procure and deploy large amounts of servers in a very short amount of time, so even if you have a lot to do in a short amount of time, we’ll be able to help you hit your goals- and help you save budget in the process!

How do I benefit by choosing Ingenuity Cloud Services over AWS, or Microsoft Azure?

We’re better value for money, we have very competitive multi-carrier networking, high performance servers at very steady costs, and we offer a huge range of bandwidth packages that are more cost-effective than their hyperscaler equivalents, including unmetered bandwidth.

If you want to optimize your infrastructure and reduce costs at the same time, you should put your more ‘stationary’ pieces of infrastructure which will require high performance and stability over flexibility on Bare Metal, such as databases which won’t need to scale up and down on demand, for more dedicated resource at a lower cost.

You should also host all your high bandwidth workloads that don’t need cloud functionality on Bare Metal to have lower monthly costs and predictable billing, with no drops in performance.

Can Bare Metal Servers be integrated with my existing AWS/Azure/Public Cloud setup?                                           

We have no problems when providing connections to AWS from our DCs. It’s a key part of integrating Bare Metal into a heavily AWS/Public Cloud setup, and it gives you the benefits and power of Bare Metal, while also utilising the scalable virtualisation of public cloud and AWS.

It allows you to have the best of both worlds, and as a result, it’s becoming more popular over time.

Support & Account Management

What is the Support & Account Management like? Do I need to spend a certain amount per month to get an account manager?

We have 24/7 support and account managers for all our customers with no minimum spend required, so support and assistance are always available, to all your sites across the globe.

You’ll also get a personal Slack channel with your account manager and to ICS tech support to ensure that you always have someone on hand to answer questions, give advice, solve problems, and to ensure your requests are always understood and executed in a timely manner.

What if my Server Crashes?

Our support teams are constantly monitoring our DCs to ensure everything continues to work as expected. So, if something fails, either we’ll notice, or there may be moments where you’ll notice first, and you can let your support contact know via email, or your personal Slack channel.

Following awareness of an issue, the support teams will go and fix it, either quickly provisioning a replacement server, or fix the broken parts to restore full service.

However, it’s much easier to give you a guaranteed uptime agreement SLA to give you peace of mind that you’re always going to be online, instead of talking about the excellence of our support team.

This is why we put our money where our mouths are, and give all our customers get a 99.995% uptime guarantee as standard, to show that we’re always going to go the extra mile to you a quality service.

I need additional IP addresses. Can you provide them?

Of course. We can provide extra IPv4 addresses for a small fee. You can also get dedicated IPV4 subnet that can be assigned on request with custom pricing.

Can I use my own IP spaces when hosting infrastructure on our servers?

Yes. We’re happy for you to use your own IP spaces, and announce your prefixes via VGP. All you need to provide are the ASN and prefixes, and we’ll configure this for you free of charge.

Bandwidth & Billing

What Billing Models do you offer?

Everything we sell is based on a monthly billing model, which is the industry standard.

Do you have a minimum contract length?

For standard specification servers, we don’t have a minimum term length, offering month by month contracts for flexible, affordable billing.

For custom builds, there’s typically a term length, but this is decided before the contracts are signed, to make sure that it’s fair for all partied involved!

How is Bandwidth Managed? Can we share bandwidth across multiple sites?

There’s a few ways that this will work out, depending on what packages you’re interested in. Typically, you’ll buy a server, and you’ll get an allotted about of bandwidth- this can vary from 5TB per month, all the way up to really large packages, such as 100TB packages (and more), depending on what you need. This is known as ‘metered bandwidth’.

For our metered bandwidth packages, we allow users to spread their bandwidth across multiple servers in the same DC by using ‘Bandwidth Pooling’. Bandwidth Pooling gives our accounts a total bandwidth allowance, instead of each site a bandwidth allowance, to help compensate for variable usage across multiple sites.

We also offer bandwidth pooling across all of Europe and the US for accounts using our 95th  percentile Bandwidth model. This ensures that you’re always making the most of your bandwidth, that sites will always have flexible bandwidth available to them, and that your billing will be always be consistent.

Do you offer Unmetered Bandwidth?

We also have ‘Unmetered Bandwidth’ packages, which allow you to use as much bandwidth that you want on your servers. This is an excellent option if you high data egress workloads.

Do you charge for Data Ingress?

We don’t charge for data ingress- we only charge for data we send out of our DCs. This can be a big cost-saver for businesses that are moving a lot of data around.

Still have Questions?

I still have questions – where can I get answers?

If you’re still looking for answers, then we’ve got a team of SDRs and Account Managers ready to solve any problems that you might be facing.

Leave some contact details with us, and we’ll call you back within 24-48 hours to find out more about what issues you’re facing, what goals you have, and to talk about how we can help!

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by nickgardenerContent Manager for Ingenuity Cloud Services. I spend my days learning and writing about all things Infrastructure, and spend the rest of my time working out, socialising with friends, or listening to podcasts on the latest updates in the IaaS world!