OpenMetal Large v4 vs AWS i4i Comparison

Q: How does the OpenMetal Large v4 compare to AWS i4i instances?

The Large v4 provides 32 dedicated physical cores, 512 GB DDR5, and 12.8 TB persistent NVMe on single-tenant hardware with fixed monthly pricing, while AWS i4i instances run on shared hosts with ephemeral storage and per-GB egress billing.

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The structural differences go beyond raw specs. The Large v4’s NVMe storage persists across reboots, while i4i instance storage is ephemeral and lost on stop or terminate, requiring EBS volumes for persistence at additional cost. The Large v4 includes full IPMI access for remote power, console, and BIOS management, which no AWS instance type provides. Boot and data drive isolation on the Large v4 keeps OS I/O off the data NVMe pool, while i4i instances share their EBS boot volume backend with other tenants.

The cost model diverges most on egress. OpenMetal bills public bandwidth on 95th percentile, meaning burst traffic does not generate per-GB charges. AWS charges $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB of egress, with tiered pricing above that. For workloads transferring 50+ TB per month, AWS egress costs alone can exceed the entire OpenMetal monthly server rate. Organizations spending above $20,000/month on public cloud typically see close to 50% cost reduction on OpenMetal. Below $10,000/month, or for workloads needing scale-to-zero or deep AWS-native service integration, public cloud may remain the better fit.