Here come hypervisors you can trust
Virtualisation has always bothered me. This is perhaps an odd statement to make; after all, I am personally responsible for virtualising thousands of servers.
But the truth of it lies in the special status the IT community has ascribed to hypervisors.
When we nerds talk about virtualisation, especially with relation to servers, we don’t talk about loading an operating system onto a server, we load a hypervisor. It’s a dangerous distinction and one that often leads systems administrators up a dark path of forgetting that a hypervisor is just as much of a security risk as any other operating system.
Indeed, hypervisors should be considered a bigger security risk than the traditional bare-metal operating system for the simple reason that we have become reliant upon them to host dozens, or even hundreds, of virtual machines per physical server.
Yet by and large, we tend to neglect the hypervisor, trusting it to just work. …..
Server vendors and the dead hand of commoditisation
They didn’t invent PCIe flash. Why not?
The leading server vendors have known about the inhibiting effect of slow disk drive performance on their users for years, yet have done nothing about it. It’s been left to companies like Fusion-io and Virident to solve that problem by inventing and popularising PCIe flash.
The problem is well known. When users run applications those apps need to be loaded into memory and access data. Memory access happens in microseconds whereas disk drive access takes milliseconds. The answer is in the “bleeding’ obvious” category; insert an intervening layer of memory between DRAM and disk.
via Server vendors and the dead hand of commoditisation • The Register.