Rackspace Inc. has rejigged its OnMetal Cloud Server lineup to deliver enhanced performance and connectivity to meet the needs of customers that require greater compute power, more intensive data processing and faster scaling and deployment capabilities.

Rackspace’s OnMetal v2 Cloud Servers went into general availability on Thursday, the company said. The basic premise is the same – bare-metal, single-tenant and API provisioned in a matter of minutes. They can run both Linux and Microsoft workloads while offering the flexibility of an OpenStack-powered public cloud, bare-metal speeds and strong security.

However, the OnMetal v2 servers pack significantly more punch, being built on second-generation Open Compute servers and powered by Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. The servers now come integrated with Cloud Networks, and are set to integrate with RackConnect 3.0 in Q2, in order to boost networking security. In addition, Rackspace is now offering international availability with decreased latency, with the U.S. and U.K. being offered regional coverage. Rackspace claims that its new servers can write 250 percent faster than its previous generation, and read up to 40 percent faster, topping out at 800GB of local boot drive storage.

To back up its claims, Rackspace cites the example of political social networking app Brigade, which said its query times had been improved by a factor of 36.5, from 7.3 seconds per query to just 0.2 seconds.

Another happy customer, DataStax Inc., which commercializes the Apache Cassandra database, also touted the advantages of Rackspace’s bare-metal servers.

“The demands of modern cloud architecture and workloads like Cassandra are pushing the industry to find performance anywhere it can,” Jonathan Ellis, co-founder at DataStax said in a statement. “Running core infrastructure on hardware like Rackspace’s OnMetal is the closest thing we have to an assured advantage: lower latency and more requests served with no changes to the code.”

Rackspace said that Windows Support will also be available in the second quarter, and has also added to its guest images selection.

Rackspace’s revamped servers come at a time of uncertainty within the company, which was recently reported to have shifted workers away from its public cloud business to work on its private and hybrid cloud projects. Sources said Rackspace was worried about the slowing pace of new signups, but at the same time the company is making inroads in other areas, like the OpenStack cloud market, thanks to a new partnership with Red Hat Inc.

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