Bare Metal Glossary

Dedicated hardware accelerators attached directly to physical servers.

Cloud API offering provisioning, reboot, reimage, and deallocation of physical servers.

Pre-reserved pool of heterogeneous bare metal nodes (CPU-only, GPU, storage-dense) that can be programmatically allocated to projects or tenants for faster onboarding and experiments.

API-driven provisioning of physical servers with cloud-like elasticity and automation.

Switching active workloads to a redundant server in case of hardware failure.

Applying OS and firmware-level security controls for compliance workloads.

Kubernetes deployed directly on physical servers without a hypervisor layer, used to maximize performance and reduce jitter for latency-sensitive or GPU/HPC workloads.

Long-term contractual use of bare metal hardware.

Traffic distribution without virtual networking layers.

Moving workloads between physical servers using imaging, clustering, or container migration.

Tracking thermals, CPU load, memory errors, RAID health, and PSU status.

Workflow automating allocation, burn-in, imaging, and OS configuration.

System that allocates bare metal hardware to users or workloads.

A dedicated physical server assigned to a single tenant, offering full access to CPU, memory, storage, and network hardware without virtualization.

Full system images used for cloning or backup scenarios.

Hardware controller enabling remote monitoring, rebooting, and imaging of the server.

Combining NICs for redundancy or increased throughput.

Automating firmware boot sequence (PXE, disk, USB).

Stress testing hardware to detect early failures before production.

Centralized management interface for blade servers or rack units.

Cisco’s remote server management solution.

Dynamically allocating compute, GPU, storage, and networking resources using software-defined hardware.

A group of bare metal nodes interconnected for parallel computation.

CPU power and performance states tuned for energy savings or maximum speed.

Physical switching infrastructure supporting high-bandwidth bare metal workloads.

Another name for a bare metal server emphasizing exclusive hardware use.

Predictable, consistent performance free from noisy-neighbor effects typical in virtualized environments.

Separating CPU, GPU, storage, and networking resources for flexible provisioning.

Removing all data before reusing or retiring hardware.

Specialized network cards that offload networking, security, or storage tasks from the CPU.

Physical servers deployed at edge locations for low-latency processing.

Short-lived dedicated servers provisioned on demand.

Verifying firmware integrity at boot to detect tampering.

Standardized firmware versions for consistency across fleets.

Servers equipped with reprogrammable silicon accelerators for custom compute workloads.

A bare metal server equipped with GPUs for AI, ML, HPC, or rendering tasks.

Managing firmware updates, diagnostics, replacement cycles, and OS installation.

A secure element that validates firmware and boot components.

Onboard timer that automatically reboots a server if the OS or hypervisor stops responding, improving availability for critical bare metal workloads.

Drives replaceable without shutting down the server.

Bare metal server optimized for scientific, GPU, or computational workloads.

Mixing cloud and on-prem bare metal environments in a unified architecture.

Running workloads directly on hardware without virtualization overhead.

Dell’s remote management controller.

HPE’s remote management controller.

High-speed, low-latency interconnect widely used in HPC bare metal clusters.

Hardware memory protection system enabling secure device passthrough.

Legacy protocol providing out-of-band management functions.

Enhanced PXE enabling HTTP/S booting and advanced configuration.

RDMA transport running over TCP.

Direct disk attachment without RAID for scale-out storage systems.

Automated Linux OS installation frameworks.

Workload requiring highly consistent low latency—often deployed on bare metal.

Rules governing upgrade, retirement, or reallocation of bare metal servers.

Bare metal servers engineered for direct liquid cooling or rear-door heat exchange to support high-density CPU/GPU configurations while staying within data center power and thermal envelopes.

Automated bare metal fleet provisioning with cloud-like APIs.

CPU firmware patches addressing stability or security issues.

A technology that partitions GPUs into independent compute instances.

Communication standard for distributed HPC workloads.

The architecture enabling GPU-to-GPU communication and bandwidth.

Physical network adapter providing ethernet connectivity.

A memory architecture in multi-socket servers where each CPU has local and remote memory, affecting latency and workload placement.

Memory placement strategies for performance in HPC environments.

External NVMe enclosures providing shared high-speed storage to bare metal systems.

High-speed flash storage connected over PCIe, commonly used in performance bare metal servers.

Technology enabling remote NVMe storage over RDMA or TCP.

NVIDIA’s on-node switching fabric that interconnects multiple GPUs (e.g., HGX systems) with very high bandwidth and low latency, enabling large model training on a single bare metal server.

OpenStack’s bare metal provisioning service that automates discovery, enrollment, imaging, and lifecycle management of physical servers via BMC/IPMI/Redfish.

Key management independent of OS for secure workloads.

Physically or logically separate network dedicated to BMC/management traffic (IPMI/Redfish/iLO/iDRAC), isolated from tenant data paths for security and reliability.

Separate VLAN dedicated to remote management interfaces (BMC/IPMI).

Technique that assigns a physical PCIe device (GPU, NIC, NVMe, FPGA) directly to a VM or container, bypassing emulation to deliver bare metal–like performance for that device.

Optimizing BIOS, CPU, memory, network, or storage settings to maximize bare metal efficiency.

Security benefit of bare metal-resources are not shared.

Hardware sensors alerting to unauthorized physical access.

Binding workloads to specific CPU cores for stability and performance.

Locking memory segments to prevent swapping for performance-critical workloads.

Controlling thermal performance and rack power budgets.

Network-based boot process used to deploy OS images.

Fully installed hardware ready for bare metal commissioning.

Policy-based limits on aggregate power draw per rack or row, enforced via server firmware and PDUs to prevent overloading circuits in dense bare metal deployments.

Disk configurations combining performance and redundancy.

Technology allowing direct memory-to-memory transfers between servers, reducing latency.

Modern, secure API framework for bare metal management.

Keyboard-video-mouse access for remote bare metal troubleshooting.

Commitment-based pricing for lower cost.

RDMA implementation over Ethernet networks.

Hardware interfaces for traditional HDDs/SSDs.

Ensures only trusted, signed bootloaders and kernels run.

Creating and deploying OS images directly to bare metal hardware.

Hardware reserved for one customer, improving performance, consistency, and security.

Widely used workload manager for HPC clusters running on bare metal.

CPU feature enabling parallel execution per core (e.g., Intel Hyper-Threading).

Assigning workloads to specific CPU sockets for performance optimization.

Abstracting hardware control via APIs for dynamic bare metal assembly.

Discounted bare metal capacity offered until reclaimed by the provider.

PCIe and NIC feature that exposes one physical adapter as many “virtual functions,” giving near line-rate performance to VMs or containers while keeping isolation enforced in hardware. Critical for high-throughput networking on bare metal hosts.

Host Bus Adapter connecting bare metal servers to SAN storage arrays.

Hardware chip enabling secure key storage and attestation.

Dynamic CPU frequency scaling to increase performance under load.

Modern NVMe drive form factors used in enterprise bare metal systems.

Firmware initializing hardware and boot processes.

Windows OS provisioning for bare metal systems.

Fully automated deployment when a server first powers on.

Enterprise file systems often used in bare metal deployments.