This morning ZDNet released a surprising interview with the Novell CTO Moiz Kohari, where he took a completely distant position from the virtualization market leader and competitor VMware.
While the VMware CEO opens its company’s premiere conference by saying that at today there’s no workload that cannot be virtualized, the Novell CTO says instead:
…virtualization has yet to overcome I/O (input/output) latency issues at the hypervisor level, as compared to provisioned servers. As a result, virtualization is not the choice in cases where service providers and businesses need to ensure as little latency as possible…
Even more surprising, considering that Novell is a long-time virtualization player, is Kohari skepticism about a fully virtualized cloud infrastructure:
“For the next five years, most machines will still be provisioned,” noted Kohari.
He said Novell’s engineers are working to resolve latency issues related to virtualization. However, until such technical barriers are overcome, cloud infrastructure providers need to operate hybrid data centers in order to support apps that run on both virtualized and non-virtualized servers.
The idea of running hybrid infrastructures as foundation of IaaS cloud computing is definitively far from the fully virtualized computing stack that VMware, Cisco and EMC are pushing with the VCE Coalition and the Vblock equipment.