Bare metal has emerged as an ideal platform for blockchain applications, because of its flexibility, performance, and low latency. It offers high performance and reliability, as well as the security that comes from being hosted on dedicated hardware. It can be used to host the entire network infrastructure, including Ethereum nodes and cryptocurrency staking operations.
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In this blog, we will explore why using bare metal servers is beneficial for blockchain use cases, and how it can improve the speed of your business operations.
What is Bare Metal Infrastructure?
At the highest level, Bare Metal Infrastructure is an architecture that uses dedicated servers, allowing you to use physical servers instead of virtual machines (VMs).
A Bare Metal Server is a physical server that runs on Bare Metal Infrastructure. Your services run directly on the underlying hardware without any virtualization layer that could slow down your node’s performance. Complete access to the physical hardware means lower latency, higher CPU performance, and no risk of noisy “neighbors” slowing you down.
Companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon use Bare Metal because it helps them scale their infrastructure quickly as they grow their businesses, while maintaining peak performance.
Blockchain Nodes on Bare Metal?
A blockchain node is a computer or server that is running the software of a specific blockchain.
The blockchain software can run on a bare metal server, or in the cloud on a virtual machine. Running a node is useful, as it means that every node in your network has access to all of its own data, and can validate transactions independently of other nodes by using its own copy of the blockchain ledger.
As you can imagine, major blockchains such as Solana require a lot of computation power to run this software, since the node needs to keep up with all the transactions being executed on the network.
It also requires high storage capacity for storing all those blocks and transactions happening daily within each node's memory. This means high bandwidth and extremely low latency is needed so that users don't experience lag when accessing their information or sending out new messages through it, which could mean missed rewards.
Enter bare metal blockchain infrastructure.
Why Should You Choose Bare Metal Infrastructure?
Bare metal infrastructure is a highly compelling way to run blockchain nodes, and applications. It's secure, efficient, and flexible.
The benefits of bare metal servers are numerous: they provide a better user experience than virtualized environments; they're more secure because you don't have to share resources with other customers in the virtualized environment; they offer greater flexibility because you can customize your hardware configuration from the ground up; and they're better suited for high-performance applications because they can provide a higher number of CPU cores per server than virtual machines (VMs). This means you can use fewer physical machines in your data center to achieve the same workloads as a VM environment.
The tradeoff is that bare metal servers require more time and resources during setup compared with VMs, but once they're up and running, they offer better performance than their counterparts.
Fortunately, Blockdaemon is here to manage this setup and maintenance for you, on your behalf.
Bare Metal vs. Cloud
It’s worth noting that while public cloud providers can offer a lot of speed and flexibility, they may not always be the best option for you or your organization. For highly custom applications like node infrastructure, it often makes more sense to host your nodes on Bare Metal.
There are a number of key differences between bare metal and cloud which are worth considering.
Bare Metal is More Customizable
For example, a customer using cloud hosting might have difficulty scaling up applications because of limitations on available resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage usage within each VM instance. This is so that cloud providers can “balance” your VM around other people that you’re sharing the physical server with.
However, this is not an issue when using bare metal servers, since they’re 100% dedicated to you. There’s no one to balance with, so you can use (and pay for) the exact amount of resources your application need.
This means you can customize your configurations based on your unique workloads, versus being limited by those imposed by cloud vendors.
Bare Metal Allows You to Build Robust Node Clusters
If your network requirements are sufficiently large, it may be possible to create a cluster of nodes that are all located in different availability zones.
In this case, you can deploy multiple instances of the same blockchain application onto different servers in each data center. These instances will then communicate with one another over a private VPN so that they can stay synchronized with one another.
This allows for some redundancy in the event of an outage: if one node goes down the cluster will stay up, allowing you to retain best-in-class uptime.
Conclusion
For blockchain, bare metal is the ideal infrastructure to support your network. It's fast and reliable, which means you can get up and running quickly with minimal investment in hardware. If you're looking for a new way to run your nodes or want more control over how they operate, then consider switching from cloud hosting solutions to Blockdaemon’s premium bare metal today.
Why Choose Blockdaemon Bare Metal Dedicated Nodes?
Blockdaemon is the leading independent multi-cloud, multi-geo blockchain infrastructure platform. Blockdaemon supports deployment on multiple clouds, in any supported region, with just a few clicks (see how to do it).
With Blockdaemon Dedicated Nodes, you help protocols to maintain their vision of optimized decentralization across distributed infrastructure providers and geography.
Benefit from:
Nodes and clusters deployed exclusively for your dedicated use. Outsourcing your node requirements to Blockdaemon removes your reliance on public infrastructure, or the ongoing challenges of node management.
Deploy nodes on major cloud and bare metal providers based on your regional preference. Remove node management overheads and deploy new nodes while remaining cost effective at every stage of your operation.
We can provide white label, dedicated nodes with co-branding opportunities available. This also includes the potential for coordinated announcements and joint PR campaigns.
