'Back to the Future' with self-hosted bare metal

Rob Hirschfeld is the CEO and co-founder of RackN, founded in 2014, focused on "addressing the messy challenge of operating at scale in physical data centers," according to his LinkedIn profile. Hirschfeld has had a front-row seat to the last decade of conversations in enterprise IT ops about bare-metal server operations and cloud repatriation, topics that remain hot as some enterprises look to move AI inference workloads on-premises.

Featuring: Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• The recent history of cloud repatriation
• The VMware factor in enterprise bare metal decisions
• How generative AI workloads change the dynamics of self-hosted infrastructure for enterprises
• Why going back to self-hosted infrastructure in 2025 doesn't mean going back to 2005 IT management practices

and more!

References:

• AWS AI Factories target hybrid cloud AI infrastructure | TechTarget
• Top 9 bare-metal cloud providers of 2025
• New VMware private AI infrastructure rethinks Tanzu, again
• Cloud repatriation vs. multi-cloud: IT seeks cost relief

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