IBM-owned infrastructure as a service provider SoftLayer has always distanced itself from its IaaS brethren by continuing to provide bare metal alongside its virtual servers and software offerings.

The company has improved on this further with a series of bare metal releases which are billed by the hour and can be deployed in under 30 minutes. The overall effect of this is a greater preponderance to deploy computing-intensive workloads on SoftLayer.

“As businesses deploy more powerful workloads in the cloud, there is increased demand for performance with even shorter demand cycles,” said SoftLayer CTO Marc Jones.

“Our new hourly bare metal servers are designed to hit the sweet spot of how much power they need, how long they need it, at price points that make sense,” he added.

These prices can be seen in the table below:

SoftLayer says this latest bare metal offering will be able immediately in its Dallas, San Jose, Washington DC, London, Toronto, Amsterdam, Singapore, and Hong Kong data centres.

The London and Toronto data centres have only been recently opened, in July and August respectively. Having just celebrated the first anniversary of being acquired by IBM, SoftLayer’s press release cycle is starting to get an IBM-ish air to it; frequent and insistent. At the very least, it’s the sign of a company looking to be innovative in the space.