OVH pulls gloves off bare metal fighters as it eyes up US cloud vendors

French hosting and web services slinger OVH has squeezed out shiny new bare metal machines in its European data centres.

The HG line is for data hungry workloads used by enterprise and academia punters, and the Rise range is for small businesses. Both are available in OVH bit barns in France, Germany, Poland and the UK.

The higher-end HG comes loaded with a redundant power, cooling and network infrastructure, and hot-swappable storage. As an option, these servers can be equipped with Nvidia P100 or Tesla M60 GPUs, and Intel’s Optane SSDs.

Customers can use the vRack private network to establish direct, physical connections at 3Gbps between all of their HG servers.

The HG is priced between £185.99 per month - ex VAT - for a machine equipped with Xeon E5-2630v3, 64GB of RAM and 4TB of HDD storage, and £1,426.99 - again ex-VAT - for a monster with two Xeon Gold 6132 CPUs, 1.5TB of RAM and 12TB of HDD storage – the latter designed specifically for in-memory databases.

Other use cases for HG servers include scientific research, big data analytics, deep learning, and anything that involves Hadoop and Spark.

The Rise part of the portfolio is for those who only need a couple of machines for things like web hosting, video streaming or running online games. This line includes three basic servers suitable for websites and apps, and two servers with a higher CPU core count for virtual machines and VDI.

Rise prices range from £53.99 ex VAT for Rise-1 with Xeon E3-1270v6, 32GB of RAM and 4TB of HDD storage, to £221.99 per month for Rise-5 with 2x Xeon E5-2650v3, 256GB of RAM and 4TB of HDD storage.

All of the new bare metal machines include 500GB of external storage space for backups, and DDoS protection as standard, without any limits on the size or the duration of the attack – with DDoS being one of the cheapest and easiest ways to ruin an internet-facing organization's day.

The hardware refresh is supposed to help get the European organisation into shape to compete with the US cloud giants like AWS or Azure. Good luck with that.

Roubaix-based OVH Group was established in 1999 and is one of Europe's largest cloud flingers, with more than a million customers. It runs a global network consisting of 28 data centres, 34 points of presence, and thousands of miles of dark fibre. The acquisition of VMware's vCloud Air business in 2017 let OVH penetrate the US market, where it now operates two data centres - in Virginia and Oregon.

OVH also runs one of the world's largest deployments of OpenStack, the open source public cloud platform.

Separately, the company announced it has certified its dedicated servers across data centres in Roubaix, Strasbourg, Beauharnois, Singapore and Sydney with ISO/IEC 27001 – a standard for information security management systemsthat OVH will try to replicates across its 28 data centres. ®