Ask HN: Looking for bare metal hosting company without virtualized NICs

11 points

4 years ago

I've been using spot Amazon c5n metal instances to do DPDK NIC I/O development work. About $1.20/hr/machine. Spot instances are awesome for development work, and on the whole, using Amazon is painless.

See https://github.com/rodgarrison/reinvent

However, AWS ENA NICs are virtualized. They are not bonafide plugged-into-the-PCI-bus cards. Therefore the data pathway to/from the NIC is not direct like it would be at home with the NIC right on the motherboard or in the PCI bus. For a cloud company probably virtualized is the only way to go.

Non-virtualized is what I have in mind for the application I have in mind. To that end, anybody know of a decent HW hosting company provides:

- Some kind of Xeon based processors - regular run of the mill COTS NICs (not virtualized) - Bonus: provides or could provide SolarFlare NICs

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