Don't be abused by the term "commodity hardware"

NoSQL paradigm claims to build clusters of "commodity hardware". But don't be abused by this term : "commodity hardware" is not your living room's computer. Commodity hardware is two slots' computer, 16+GB RAM, (ten)giga ethernet, raid5 hard disks.

Commodity hardware is not 500$ computers. It's 5000$ computers. But building a 10 nodes' cluster for 50'000$ is still really cheap.

And remeber : clusters' primary bottlneck is I/O. Both disk and network. So there is no place for virtualisation here.