Despite the fact that organizations are increasingly opting to rent hardware from cloud providers instead of purchasing their own, Moore’s law is still very much factoring into infrastructure spending. The latest example of its indirect influence came last week when Rackspace Inc. introduced a new generation of bare-metal servers that promise to provide a significantly bigger bang for the buck than the previous iteration.

Each OnMetal machine packs up to two of Intel Corp.’s latest E5-2600 v3 processors and a pair of 800-gigabyte flash drives for keeping boot files. The new servers also offer better general-purpose storage than their predecessors that Rackspace says can ingest information more than twice as fast and perform read operations up to 40 percent quicker. The upgrade should help the company compete much more effectively over databases and other applications that process a lot of records.

The launch of the new OnMetal servers came against the backdrop of Microsoft Corp. bolstering its own cloud lineup with a new managed implementation of Dynamics AX. Like Office, Active Directory and the other on-premise solutions that Redmond has adapted for the software-as-a-service market in the past few years, the resource planning system will now be offered on a subscription basis. The move should level the playing field against rivals like Workday Inc. that have been offering on-demand pricing for quite some time now.

But before the industry had a chance to fully internalize the implications of the announcement, Microsoft was back in the headlines again thanks to Salesforce.com Inc.’s addition of Outlook support to its inbox plug-in. The integration will enable joint users to pull information about a contact from the customer management platform and analyze past email exchanges to find ways of improving their deal-making efforts. The release also brings automation functionality designed to speed up mundane chores like scheduling conference calls. 

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