Dedibox, Elastic Metal, and M1: Exploring Scaleway's Bare Metal catalog

At Scaleway, we offer a wide range of bare metal products that includes three main products: Dedibox, Elastic Metal, and M1. From affordable dedicated servers to flexible pricing and native integration into a complete cloud ecosystem, we have something for everyone. 

In this article, we will explore the features and benefits of each of these product ranges, understand why they are so popular among users and tell you everything about what's to come..

It all started with Dedibox

Scaleway's story started with Dedibox back in 2005, when the first dedicated servers came out and impressed the market with their incomparable price/quality ratio. From a few "made in France" servers, Dedibox grew into a large product range. available in 4 highly reliable and ultra-secure data centers in France and the Netherlands. Today Dedibox is a golden standard of dedicated servers in Europe, with over 17,000 clients all over the world in more than 140 countries. Various businesses from small start-ups to giant tech or financial actors choose Dedibox for its reliability and affordable price.

Dedibox encompasses four product ranges: Start, Pro, Core, and Store with more than 80 servers configurations in total. From accessible Start offers, that can be just enough to perform tests, web hosting, or gaming at an affordable price, to Store range designed for clients that seek high-volume storage and performance, through Pro and Core ranges for production, there is a choice for any customer profile.

To check out the full list of Dedibox servers and prices, visit this page.

What's next?

Dedibox still today is one of the most complete and reliable bare metal offering in Europe, tested and proven by its clients since over 15 years. With its extensive product line, we plan on maintaining high stock through all data centers and offer our clients the best user experience. 

On the hardware side, Scaleway team continuously makes sure that rented Dedibox servers receive on-time maintenance during its lifecycle. For the end-of-life products (servers average lifespan is between 7 to 10 years), we accompany our clients through the migration process and pro-actively propose replacement options among our bare metal solutions. Multiple teams work together to make this transition experience as smooth as possible.

We are also proud of the dedicated support as well as customer success teams that help or guide our Dedibox clients.

From the tooling perspective, we now offer Dedibox clients the possibility to migrate from the historical Dedibox console to the modern and reviewed Scaleway console. Why do so? There are multiple reasons:

1. Enjoy an improved simplified interface that keep evolving

2. If you are using other Scaleway products, manage your entire infrastructure and its billing in one location

3. Use Terraform for your servers deployment (stay tuned on this new feature coming soon, it's currently on the roadmap!)

Migration process takes a few minutes only by following the process through the link https://link-dedibox.scaleway.com/.

Apple Mac mini M1

In 2020 we decided to onboard on the Apple Silicon journey. The Mac mini M1's launch opened the possibility of offering  Bare Metal Apple Servers to our customers.

It was a risky bet for us, as we were the first provider to release an offering based on this new processor! Through our discovery, we figured out that Apple users were often Apple lovers and advocates, users who use only Apple products, and that the Apple ecosystem makes Mac hardware an essential part. Thanks to their use cases we started to understand  what makes the Mac mini M1 such an appealing Bare Metal server.\
Over the past years customers from various industries have been continuously renting hundreds of Mac mini M1, and there are 3 reasons for this.

• Reason 1: the flexibility and affordability 

At €0.11/hour with a one-day rent minimum (rules coming from Apple), renting a Mac mini prevent you from breaking the bank for short and punctual usages. If you need to acces the machine from time to time to check your code and its appearance on an iOS, macOS, ipadOS you'd better rent it for a day at €2.64 than spend €699 (a Mac mini M2 cost €699) to buy it.

• Reason 2: what you do on a Mac mini isn't easily transferable on an other Bare Metal machine

When you're building applications for the Mac ecosystem you will likely want to test it against multiple devices and versions of MacOs, iOs, iPadOs… and you'll want to do it automatically. To do so you will need to use Apple hardware and configure it in such a way that you can automatically test that your app is working as expected on these various configurations.

• Reason 3: Apple has its own environment which some developers won't change for anything

For tasks that can be done on both Mac or Linux hardware, some users will always want to use a Mac interface. This is especially true since new Mac Hardware is now compatible with recent AI frameworks and tools.

What's next?

This year, we expand the range of Apple servers with the Mac mini M2 PRO that has been launched by Apple in January 2023. The Mac mini M2 PRO will join Scaleway's ecosystem before the end of 2023 offering you an experience at least 1.9 times faster than before! "With its 12-core CPU Mac mini M2 PRO offers 1.9 times faster performance than M1, and its 19-core GPU is up to 2.6 times faster" Apple official statements.

Elastic Metal

To bring bare metal in our Cloud Ecosystem, we prepared a first offering called Bare-Metal as a Service, effectively taking Dedibox offers and allowing to order them by the hour. It was limited, but was a great source of information and experience to fine tune exactly what we wanted to offer to our customers. In 2022, the Scaleway team created Elastic Metal with four product ranges: Aluminium, Beryllium, Lithium, and Titanium with 14 configurations in total. Why not simply add new offers within Dedibox? Because Elastic Metal is not just dedicated servers… Elastic Metal combines dedicated performance with flexible pricing and native integration into our complete cloud ecosystem, so you can easily combine it with other products such as Kubernetes or Load Balancer. Building a private cloud ecosystem the way your business requires has become possible thanks to an isolated and secure network between Elastic Metal and Cloud servers. Easy management of your network from one interface as well as following your consumption and billing information is the ultimate goal at Scaleway, and we are constantly working on improving this user experience.

Over a thousand customers already use Elastic Metal servers today to build their personalized private or hybrid network. Our servers are available in three availability zones in France and the Netherlands, with further expansion plans within Europe. 

Configurations of Elastic Metal offer a large choice of processors and high volumes of local storage within each range. 

According to a recent satisfaction survey, clients choose Elastic Metal for

1. Price/performance ratio, 

2. Storage size, 

3. Virtualization capabilities

4. Flexible billing. 

74% of clients are highly satisfied with their servers: "Elastic Metal is an excellent mix between the ease of management of instances with the power of dedicated servers."

What's next?

Elastic Metal product range keeps growing and we have both new products coming up as well as exciting features. This year we plan to diversify our Elastic Metal offers with more performant offers based on AMD Ryzen and AMD EPYC processors. As for the features, we are currently focusing on such deliverables as custom partitioning, adding new OS, faster installation, more bandwidth options etc… Stay tuned!

What's in there?