Mendel Rosenblum, VMware co-founder and chief science officer, yesterday urged delegates to the USENIX 07 conference to ditch database OS stacks in favour of streamlined alternatives built on virtual machines.

In his keynote address to the conference Rosenblum, who teaches operating system design at Stanford University, said the complexity of modern, code-heavy operating systems compromises the security and performance of database systems. He said the time was ripe for database designers to move their applications to hyper-visor based systems that dispense with redundant code that creates security vulnerabilities and eats valuable compute cycles.

Rosenblum’s advocacy of a reduced role for operating systems in modern computer installations is fast becoming a familiar refrain.

At VMworld 2006 the Stanford professor’s wife and VMware president Diane Greene promised that VMware’s hyper-visor technology would disrupt the industry status quo that has seen the operating system act as the defining feature of most systems for the past for decades. She promised that virtualisation would obviate “arbitrary reasons for purchasing software”, and allow customer to choose software “based on functionality, reliability, performance and price.”

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