Rackspace, Inc. has just revealed pricing for its new OnMetal servers, which are now generally available following a limited trial phase.

The dedicated, single-tenant bare-metal machines are designed for applications that can run without hypervisors. They be spun up in less than a minute using the Rackspace cloud OpenStack API, the company said.

Rackspace used designs provided by the Facebook-led Open Compute Project to build its OnMetal servers and added its own tweaks including external cooling and 100 percent solid-state storage. Customers can choose from three different configurations optimized for different kinds of workloads. Two pricing tiers are offered for each configuration – one comes with Rackspace’s standard Managed Infrastructure support, while the other comes with more inclusive Managed Operations support.

The cheapest configuration is OnMetal Compute. It offers ten Intel Xeon CPUs, 32GB of RAM and no extra storage. These are aimed at those running web and app servers, load balancing, queue processing, and come priced at $550 and $700 per server/month for Managed Infrastructure and Managed Operations, respectively.

Next up are the OnMetal Memory servers, which come with 12 CPU cores and 512GB of memory. These are meant for caching, in-memory analytics and search indexing operations, says Rackspace. These are available for $1,650 or $1,800 per server/month.

At the high end, OnMetal I/O servers provide 20 CPU cores and 128GM of RAM, plus 3.2TB of disk storage. These servers are optimized for online transaction processing (OLTP) and database-intensive applications, and will set users back $1,800 or $1,950 per server/month, depending on the level of support.

There’s a catch in the price of Managed Operations support. While the service costs an extra $200 per server/month, Rackspace demands a minimum service charge of $500/month, so the benefits don’t kick in until the user is running at least three servers.

There are other charges, too, such as outgoing network bandwidth, which starts at $0.12 per GB for the first 10TB and decreases on a sliding scale with volume.

The pricing structure means that Rackspace’s OnMetal servers cost about the same as comparable servers offered by cloud rivals like AWS, Google and Microsoft. However, these all offer pay-as-you-go pricing plans which might make more sense for those with reduced demands for their server.

Rackspace tested the systems with some customers in a limited availability release last month and “customers have shown great interest,” wrote Ev Kontsevoy, director of products at Rackspace, in a post on the company blog. “Some of them are looking to move away from the unpredictable nature of virtualized, multi-tenant environments, while others are intrigued by our promise of ‘elasticity of the cloud, plus economy of colocation,” he wrote.

While Rackspace has struggled to compete with its rivals in the cloud, these new offerings are aimed at its wheelhouse. The company’s most recent financial results showed that over 70 percent of its revenues come from dedicated, single-tenant hosting. The OnMetal servers should help it to capitalize on that business.

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