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The OpenMetal team is standing by to assist you with scoping out a fixed-cost model based infrastructure plan to fit your needs, budgets and timelines.
The Illusion of Invisible Infrastructure
For the past decade, public cloud providers have sold you a compelling narrative: infrastructure should be invisible. Press a button, spin up resources, scale automatically, and never worry about the underlying hardware. This promise of abstraction was supposed to free your teams to focus on innovation instead of operations.
But what happens when invisible becomes opaque? When you can’t see your costs until the bill arrives? When performance mysteriously degrades and you have no visibility into why? When compliance auditors ask about data location and you can only shrug?
The uncomfortable truth is that invisible infrastructure often means you’re flying blind. As enterprises grapple with AI workloads, cloud repatriation strategies, and the VMware licensing upheaval, a critical question emerges: is invisible infrastructure serving your business, or is it time to make the invisible visible?
The Hidden Costs of Invisibility
Cost Opacity: The Monthly Surprise
Hyperscale cloud billing reads like a phone book written in ancient Sanskrit. Every API call, data transfer, and storage operation generates line items that multiply into bills that can swing wildly month to month. Your finance team starts each month playing a guessing game with the infrastructure budget.
Egress charges alone can blindside organizations. Move data between regions? That’s a charge. Download your own data? That’s another charge. Scale up during a traffic spike? Surprise—your bandwidth costs just tripled. The 95th percentile billing model that makes sense for enterprises gets replaced with pay-per-byte schemes that penalize growth and innovation.
The real kicker? You often don’t see these charges until after you’ve incurred them. Your CFO asks for next quarter’s infrastructure forecast, and the honest answer is: “We have no idea.”
Performance Opacity: The Noisy Neighbor Problem
In the shared tenancy world of public cloud, you’re competing for resources with workloads you can’t see, running applications you don’t know, following patterns you can’t predict. Your mission-critical database suddenly slows down not because of your code, but because someone else’s machine learning job decided to max out the shared storage system.
Hyperscalers throttle resources based on algorithms you can’t access, using metrics you can’t see. Network performance varies by time of day, region load, and factors completely outside your control. When your application performance degrades, you file a support ticket and wait for someone to tell you what might be wrong with infrastructure you can’t access.
For AI and ML workloads that demand consistent high-performance networking and storage throughput, this opacity becomes a genuine barrier to success. You need predictable east-west traffic performance for training data synchronization, but you’re operating in an environment where network performance is a black box.
Operational Opacity: Support Ticket Roulette
When something breaks in the public cloud, you don’t troubleshoot—you guess. No root access means no direct investigation. No visibility into underlying systems means no understanding of root causes. You file support tickets and hope the first-level support agent understands your infrastructure better than you do.
The troubleshooting process becomes a game of telephone: you describe symptoms to support, they escalate to engineers you’ll never talk to, who make changes to systems you can’t see, and report back solutions you can’t verify. For complex enterprise workloads, this opacity turns every incident into a lengthy investigation where you’re the least informed participant.
Making the Invisible Visible: OpenMetal’s Approach
OpenMetal challenges this entire paradigm. Instead of hiding infrastructure behind layers of abstraction, we believe infrastructure should be visible, transparent, and under your control—without sacrificing the automation and speed you expect from modern cloud platforms.
Transparent Pricing: Budgets You Can Actually Budget
Every OpenMetal hosted private cloud cluster comes with fixed monthly costs. No surprise charges, no hidden fees, no bill shock. You know exactly what your infrastructure costs each month, giving your finance team the predictability they need for accurate forecasting.
Our 95th percentile egress billing model aligns with how enterprises actually consume bandwidth. You get generous included bandwidth that covers normal operations, with clearly defined overage costs that are competitive and predictable. This means you can scale your applications without fear of runaway charges, and your CFO can build realistic infrastructure budgets.
“When customers can see their infrastructure costs clearly, they make better technical and business decisions,” says Todd Robinson, OpenMetal’s President. “Invisible billing leads to invisible waste. Transparent pricing leads to intentional architecture.”
Transparent Architecture: Dedicated Hardware You Can See
Each OpenMetal customer runs on dedicated bare metal servers. No noisy neighbors, no shared tenancy performance issues, no competing for resources with unknown workloads. You get servers with dual 10 Gbps NICs providing 20 Gbps private networking—performance you can count on for data-intensive applications.
Your networking comes provisioned with customer-specific VLANs that are VXLAN-ready, giving you isolation, scalability, and the ability to span workloads across multiple data centers when needed. Unlike hyperscale clouds where networking is a black box, you can see exactly how your traffic flows and optimize accordingly.
Ceph distributed storage integrates into every cloud, providing unified object, block, and file storage with replication for availability and erasure coding for efficiency. But here’s the key difference: it’s all visible and configurable. You can see exactly how your storage operates, tune performance characteristics, and understand the underlying architecture supporting your applications.
Transparent Operations: Root Access and Real Support
You get full root access to your servers and control planes. This means deeper customization capabilities, direct troubleshooting access, and the ability to optimize your environment exactly how your applications need it. OpenStack APIs provide standardized, open interfaces for provisioning compute, storage, and networking resources—no proprietary lock-in, no vendor-specific tooling requirements.
When issues arise, you work directly with experienced infrastructure engineers, not first-level support scripts. This gives you confidence that problems will be understood in context and resolved efficiently, with full visibility into what happened and why.
Why Visibility Creates Better Outcomes
Financial Visibility: CFO-Level Confidence
Transparent infrastructure costs enable accurate financial modeling. You can forecast growth, plan capacity expansions, and build infrastructure budgets with actual data instead of best guesses. When you know your baseline costs and understand your scaling patterns, you can make strategic decisions about resource allocation.
This visibility becomes particularly valuable during budget cycles and financial planning. Instead of presenting infrastructure costs as a variable expense with unpredictable spikes, you can treat it as a known operational cost that scales predictably with business growth.
Technical Visibility: Engineering Excellence
When your team can see how infrastructure actually works, they can optimize applications accordingly. Understanding storage performance characteristics helps database administrators tune queries. Seeing network topology enables architects to design better microservices communication patterns. Having access to underlying systems means faster troubleshooting and more targeted performance improvements.
For AI and ML workloads, this visibility becomes essential. Training large models requires consistent high-throughput networking and storage. When you can see and control these characteristics, you can architect solutions that actually work at scale.
Business Visibility: Trust and Compliance
Regulatory compliance often requires understanding exactly where data lives, how it’s protected, and who has access. Invisible infrastructure makes these questions impossible to answer with confidence. Visible infrastructure gives you the documentation and control necessary for audit compliance.
Data sovereignty requirements become manageable when you can see and control exactly where your workloads run. For industries with strict compliance requirements, infrastructure visibility isn’t just convenient—it’s mandatory.
Case in Point: Hosted Private Cloud with OpenMetal
OpenMetal’s Cloud Core deployments start with three hyperconverged servers that integrate compute, storage, and networking in a configuration you can see and understand. These clusters scale horizontally with no downtime—you add nodes as your applications demand more resources.
The integrated Ceph storage system provides the unified storage platform your applications need, with performance characteristics you can monitor and tune. The 20 Gbps private networking ensures high-throughput east-west traffic for data replication, backup operations, and inter-service communication.
All of this runs on OpenStack APIs, giving you standardized interfaces for automation while maintaining complete visibility into underlying operations. You get cloud speed and automation with private control and transparency.
From Black Box to Glass Box
The broader industry is recognizing that invisible infrastructure creates more problems than it solves. As enterprises migrate away from VMware due to Broadcom’s licensing changes, they’re seeking alternatives built on open-source foundations with transparent operations.
AI workloads demand predictable performance characteristics that black-box cloud infrastructure simply can’t guarantee. Machine learning training jobs need consistent network throughput, predictable storage latency, and the ability to optimize resource allocation—all of which require visibility into underlying systems.
Cloud repatriation trends reflect this same need for control and predictability. Organizations that moved workloads to public cloud for speed and scale are discovering that long-term success requires infrastructure they can see, understand, and optimize.
OpenMetal represents a philosophical shift from black-box cloud to glass-box cloud. Instead of hiding complexity behind layers of abstraction, we make infrastructure transparent while maintaining the automation and elasticity you expect from modern cloud platforms.
The Call for Visibility
Invisible infrastructure was supposed to simplify operations, but it often just shifts complexity from places you can see to places you can’t. The result is infrastructure that’s harder to optimize, more expensive to scale, and impossible to troubleshoot effectively.
The future belongs to organizations that can see their infrastructure clearly. Visible costs enable better financial planning. Visible architecture enables better application design. Visible operations enable faster problem resolution.
As you evaluate your infrastructure strategy—whether you’re leaving VMware, planning AI initiatives, or reconsidering public cloud costs—ask yourself: does invisible infrastructure serve your business goals, or would you benefit from infrastructure you can actually see?
The answer is becoming clear across the industry: visible infrastructure creates better outcomes for engineering teams, finance teams, and business leaders. Transparent operations enable optimization. Predictable costs enable planning. Direct access enables innovation.
Visible means empowered. And empowered infrastructure teams build better businesses.
OpenMetal can help with a PoC Cloud
Start with a risk-free evaluation: Take advantage of OpenMetal’s Proof of Concept program to validate how hosted private cloud can transform your delivery model.