Q: We are trying to get away from a huge public cloud bill. How do I know you will save me 30-50%?
We have done this before for customers in many different situations. Of course, results will differ based on the following factors:
Are you over the “Tipping Point” in cloud spend? There are a few major factors to consider:
Is your team highly technical? If so, running an OpenMetal Cloud is not much different, skill set wise, to what is needed to maintain health fleet of VMs, storage, and networking. It can actually improve your operational expenses as our team is much more available than any major cloud provider.
Public Cloud is a good solution when cloud spends is around $10k/month or less. Hosted Private Cloud is a close cousin to public cloud – spin up on demand, transparent pricing – but scale is important to get the most value from the cloud.
Also, if for any reason it is not a fit, you have a self service 30 day money back guarantee or the 30 days free PoC time. No obligations or lock-in.
Q: Is there any shared hardware in our OpenMetal Cloud?
Your servers are 100% dedicated to you. The crossover between your OpenMetal Cloud and the overall data center comes at the physical switch level for internet traffic and for IPMI traffic. For internet traffic, you are assigned a set of VLANs within the physical switches. Those VLANs only terminate on your hardware. For administrative purposes, your hardware’s those departments or people. You can set resource limitations that will be enforced by OpenStack. Regardless of if the project is being managed via API or through Horizon, OpenStack will enforce your policies. As OpenStack is an API-first system, there is often more functionality available via the API than within Horizon. For Cloud Administrators, a robust CLI that uses the API is the most popular way to administer OpenStack.
Q: Are there license costs by VM or other resources?
OpenMetal uses open source technology for all major systems. There are no license fees for any OpenStack feature supplied in the standard cloud system or for any features supplied by additional OpenStack components. We do include access to Datadog for hardware node monitoring included in the cost of the cloud. If you elect to use Datadog for something other than the included hardware node monitoring, you would need to pay Datadog directly for this.
Q: Can my workload or application run on OpenMetal?
Yes. We have yet to find a workload that cannot be run on either our OpenStack Cloud or our Bare Metal. If you can dream it, we can help you run it!
Also, if for any reason it is not a fit, you have a self service 30 day money back guarantee or the 30 days free PoC time. No obligations or lock-in.
Q: What is the onboarding process like?
It is slightly different for the self service vs the PoC process but you can count on the following:
-An Account Manager, Account Engineer, and an Executive Sponsor will be assigned from our side
-You will be invited to our Slack for Engineer to Engineer support
-Your Account Manager will collect your goals and we will align our efforts to your success
-You can meet with your support team via Google Meet (or the video system of your choice) up to weekly to help keep the process on schedule
-Migration planning if existing workloads are being brought over
-Discussion on agreements and potential discounts via ramps if moving workloads over time
Q: Is there a graphical user interface?
We offer OpenMetal Central as a GUI as well as by API. OpenStack and Ceph both have an administrative GUI and a "Self Service User" GUI. Of note, as OpenStack and Ceph are often considered to be “API first” or "Infrastructure as Code first" applications, more administrative features are available via API or Command Line than within the administrative interface. For users that you might give self-service access, OpenStack and Ceph have strong capabilities within the GUI.
Q: How many IOPS will I get?
These servers are dedicated to you. IOPS will vary by the hardware you purchase and the technology you are using to access the hardware. The drives used are data center grade Intel NVMe or SATA SSDs. Spinning hard drives are data center grade.
For extremely high IOPS, we recommend using the NVMe or SATA SSD drives directly from your application. This means that you will need to accomplish data integrity and high availability through your software. By doing this though, many applications like high-performance databases can function extremely well. The NVMe drives on the HC Standards and the Compute Standards, in particular, have extreme IOPS. It bears repeating though - you must handle data integrity and HA yourself.
For very high IOPS with built-in data protection, Ceph with a replication of 2 on NVMe drives is popular. A replica level of 3 will slightly reduce the IOPS but is a recommended choice.
Q: How are IP addresses handled?
We supply IPv4 for lease and will be terminated on your VLANs. We can provide an IPv6 prefix on request in certain data centers (/56 ~ /52 for no charge, larger blocks up to /48 are possible but will incur a charge). You can also SWIP your IPv4 blocks to us.
Q: For Ceph data redundancy, why choose 3 replicas versus 2 replicas or vice-versa?
When Ceph has been hyper-converged onto 3 servers with a replica level of 3 when you lose one of the 3 members, Ceph can not recover itself out of a degraded state until the lost member is restored or replaced. The data is not at risk since two copies remain but it is now effectively a Replica level of 2. When Ceph has been hyper-converged onto 3 servers with a replica level of 2 when you lose one of the 3 members, Ceph can be set to self-heal by taking any data that has fallen to 1 replica and automatically start the copy process to recover to a replica level of 2. Your data loss danger only occurs during the time when only 1 replica is present.
Disaster recovery processes for data have progressed significantly. This will be based on your specific situation, but if restoring data from backups to production is straightforward and fast, then in the extremely rare case of both of the 2 replicas failing in the degraded period, you will then need to recover from backups.
Q: What is your network uptime?
The network performance has been above 99.99% since 2022. See our Service Level Agreement page for full details: https://openmetal.io/legal/sla/
Q: What are we responsible for versus what you are responsible for?
As a customer-centric business, we want to provide paths to help you succeed. If you are finding a barrier to your success within our system, please escalate your contact within OpenMetal Central. There we provide direct contact to our product manager, our support manager, and to our company president.
In general, we manage the networks above your OpenMetal Clouds and we supply the hardware and parts replacements as needed for hardware in your OpenMetal Clouds.
OpenMetal Clouds themselves are managed by your team. If your team has not managed OpenStack and Ceph private clouds before, we have several options to be sure you can succeed.
In addition, we may maintain a free "cloud in a VM" image you can use for testing and training purposes within your cloud.
Q: Where are your data centers? What certifications do you have?
Ashburn, Virginia, East Coast USA.
Los Angeles, California, West Coast USA.
Amsterdam, Netherlands, Central Europe.
International Business Park, Singapore, Asia Pacific.
Need another location? We are expanding!
Data center certifications include: SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, PCI-DSS, NIST 800-53/FISMA, HIPAA, ISO 27001, ISO 22301, ISO 50001, LEED Gold. OpenMetal is HIPAA compliant and pursuing SOC 2 certification in 2026.
Q: How do I give self-service access to different departments or people within my company?
Self-service access to VMs, networking space, storage, and other OpenStack services are handled through the Horizon interface or through automation against OpenStack APIs. As the cloud administrator, you will set up projects for those departments or people. You can set resource limitations that will be enforced by OpenStack. Regardless of if the project is being managed via API or through Horizon, OpenStack will enforce your policies. As OpenStack is an API-first system, there is often more functionality available via the API than within Horizon. For Cloud Administrators, a robust CLI that uses the API is the most popular way to administer OpenStack.
