Q: How does the OpenMetal Large v5 compare to AWS i4i instances?
The Large v5 delivers 32 dedicated Granite Rapids cores, 512 GB DDR5-6400, 12.8 TB of persistent local NVMe, and full IPMI on single-tenant hardware with fixed monthly pricing — against AWS i4i’s shared-host vCPUs, smaller per-instance RAM, ephemeral instance storage, and per-GB egress billing.
The closest AWS profile by spec category is the i4i family (storage-optimized with persistent-pattern NVMe), where the i4i.4xlarge (16 vCPUs, 128 GB RAM, 1x 3,750 GB NVMe) is the nearest hourly-cost tier and i4i.metal is the nearest raw-spec match. The structural differences matter more than the spec-by-spec mapping. AWS i4i vCPUs are threads on a shared host’s physical CPU; Large v5 cores are 32 dedicated Granite Rapids physical cores with BIOS-level access and no shared-tenancy noise. AWS i4i NVMe is ephemeral — contents are lost on stop or terminate, requiring EBS at additional cost and latency for persistent state — while Large v5 NVMe is local persistent storage that survives reboots.
Pricing is the most consequential difference for sustained workloads. Large v5 is one fixed monthly fee that includes 6 Gbps of public bandwidth on 95th-percentile billing, with east-west traffic to other OpenMetal servers included at no per-GB charge. AWS i4i bills hourly per instance plus per-GB egress at approximately $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB monthly, plus EBS for persistence, plus inter-AZ traffic at $0.01-0.02/GB. At sustained 24/7 operation above ~30-40% utilization, the OpenMetal fixed-cost model typically beats AWS reserved-instance pricing once egress and storage are included.
When AWS wins: scale-to-zero workloads (Lambda, Fargate), tight integration with managed services (DynamoDB, SageMaker, EventBridge), global edge footprint via CloudFront, and small-scale operations where the operational simplicity of fully-managed services outweighs unit-cost differences. When OpenMetal wins: sustained workloads, egress-heavy traffic, persistent local storage, compliance and confidential computing requirements (TDX via 1 TB upgrade), predictable budgeting, and migrations off VMware. The detailed cost model and TCO comparison is on the OpenMetal Large v5 vs AWS i4i page.
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