What IT pros need to know about server provisioning

by Canonical on 23 January 2017

Big Software, IoT and Big Data are changing how organisations are architecting, deploying, and managing their infrastructure. Traditional models are being challenged and replaced by software solutions that are deployed across many environments and many servers. However, no matter what infrastructure you have, there are bare metal servers under it, somewhere.

Organisations are looking for more efficient ways to balance their hardware and infrastructure investments with the efficiencies of the cloud. Canonical’s MAAS (Metal As A Service) is such a technology. MAAS is designed for devops at scale, in places where bare metal is the best way to run your applications. Big data, private cloud, PAAS and HPC all thrive on MAAS. Hardware has always been an expensive and difficult resource to deploy within a data centre, but is unfortunately still a major consideration for any organisation moving all or part of their infrastructure to the cloud. To become more cost-effective, many organisations hire teams of developers to cobble together software solutions that solve functional business challenges while leveraging existing legacy hardware in the hopes of offsetting the need to buy and deploy more hardware-based solutions.

MAAS isn’t a new concept, but demand and adoption rates are growing because many enterprises want to combine the flexibility of cloud services with the raw power of bare metal servers to run high-power, scalable workloads. For example, when a new server needs to be deployed, MAAS automates most, if not all, of the provisioning process. Automation makes deploying solutions much quicker and more efficient because it allows tedious tasks to be performed faster and more accurately without human intervention. Even with proper and thorough documentation, manually deploying server to run web services or Hadoop, for example, could take hours compared to a few minutes with MAAS.

Forward thinking companies are leveraging server provisioning to combine the flexibility of the cloud with the power and security of hardware. For example:

• High Performance Computing organisations are using MAAS to modernise how they deploy and allocate servers quickly and efficiently.
• Smart Data centers are using MAAS to enable multi purpose their server usage to improve efficiency and ensure servers do not go underutilised.
• Hybrid cloud providers leverage MAAS to provide extra server support during peak demand times and between various public cloud providers

This ebook: Server Provisioning: What Network Admins & IT Pros Need to Know outlines how innovative companies are leveraging MAAS to get more out of their hardware investment while making their cloud environments more efficient and reliable. Smart IT pros know that going to the cloud does not mean having to rip and replace their entire infrastructure to take advantage of the opportunities the cloud offers. Canonical’s MAAS is a mature solution to help organisations to take full advantage of their cloud and legacy hardware investments.

Get started with MAAS

To download and install MAAS for free please visit ubuntu.com/download/server-provisioning or to talk to one of our scale-out experts about deploying MAAS in your datacenter contact us. For more information please download our free eBook on MAAS.

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