Movidis Launches Multicore MIPS-Debian Server

Published: August 14, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The race to provide powerful--but not power-consuming--servers just got a new entry. Movidis, a relatively unknown startup from Santa Barbara, California, that was formed five years ago to provide streaming servers for video on demand (VOD) has created a new design based on a multicore MIPS processor and the Debian variant of Linux, which is an enthusiastic supporter of the MIPS chip.

The Revolution x16 server that Movidis is launching at the LinuxWorld tradeshow in San Francisco today is actually not the company's first product, but it may be the first one that goes mainstream. According to Ken Goldsholl, chief executive officer at Movidis, the company created a streaming media server tuned specifically for VOD applications based on IBM's PowerPC processors. This first Movidis design was a blade server setup that had 11 PowerPC cores and a cache server to stage video streams before they were pushed down the cable to video customers. While this original VOD server could move data very quickly, when Movidis started work on its next-generation server--with the express goal of bringing to cost of VOD stream down even further, which would help stimulate the adoption of VOD services by cable companies--it looked around for a more compact, energy-efficient approach that would provide even better performance.

That's when it found Cavium Networks, a chip designer based in Mountain View, California, that is an expert in creating variants of the MIPS RISC processor that was originally created by Silicon Graphics for its workstations and supercomputers. (SGI has long since spun out of the MIPS processor as a separate business, and the MIPS chip has become a popular alternative to X86 and Power processors for embedded applications.) Cavium actually sells three different 64-bit MIPS variants to companies that use them in network equipment and other electronic devices. The Octeon CN30XX is a single-core MIPS chip that burns 2 to 4 watts and supports DDR2 main memory and PCI peripheral interfaces; the Octeon CN31XX has one or two cores and supports DDR2 main memory and PCI-X interfaces (burning from 4 to 7 watts); and the CN8XX chip has from four to 16 cores, supports DDR2 and Reduced Latency DRAM (RLDRAM) as well as faster PCI-X peripherals (with a power envelope of between 10 and 30 watts).

Movidis is taking the top-end Octeon MIPS64 processor, the CN3860, from Cavium to build its Revolution x16 server. Cavium actually supplies Movidis with a tweaked version of Debian 2.6 Linux that is compatible with the Octeon chips and has been extended with 64-bit memory support, and then Movidis adds other Debian-based applications on top of that, such as the Apache Web server, the Perl, Python, and PHP languages, and the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Because the Octeon chips were made for networking applications where security and bandwidth are key, the chip has encryption and decryption electronics built in, as well as eight Gigabit Ethernet ports. So those 16 MIPS cores (which are dual-issue cores) are not involved in handling network traffic or encryption, which means they can just be used to move data from disk drives and out to the network. This is, after all, what a VOD server does. Of course, it occurred to Movidis that this is also what a Web server, an application server, and a database server also does these days. And with a Debian distribution, suddenly what was a VOD server can now be a very powerful general-purpose server, too.

According to Goldsholl, a Revolution x16 server with a single processor and main memory and other components like the on-board SATA controller (which has eight ports) only burns about 50 watts. This is a very low amount of power, which is possible in part because the Octeon MIPS64 chips are only running at 500 MHz or 600 MHz. The Revolution x16 server has a boot flash drive that expands up to 16 MB, a storage flash drive that ranges from 128 MB to 1 GB, and four DDR2 DRAM slots that allow up to 8 GB of main memory to be crammed into the system. The 1U variant of the server has room for a few disk drives, but if you want to add up to 6 TB of data to the box, you have to get the 2U variant and plug in eight SATA or SAS drives to the RAID controller. (This 2U box has room for four more drives, but you need to plug in an optional RAID controller for the extra four ports.) The 1U model with a 500 MHz processor complex costs $2,995 with no disks and 2 GB of main memory; you add another $1,000 to get the 600 MHz processor. The 2U box with 6 TB of disk, 2 GB of memory, and the 500 MHz Octeon chip costs $11,995. If you want to use the board as the basis of your own product, rather than buying a server, Movidis will sell you a board and development tools for $1,995, and if you don't need features--such as the RAID controller because you are trying to make a router--you pay less. This OEM version is called the x16 Network Application Platform.

The most obvious comparison to make to this new Revolution x16 server is to Sun Microsystems's "Niagara" T1000 and T2000 line. The Niagara chip is a variant of the 64-bit UltraSparc-II processor that has four threads per core and eight cores per chip, which burns between 70 and 79 watts, depending on the workload. The Niagara chip runs at 1 GHz or 1.2 GHz, and depending on the model of the server, Sun has four, six, or eight cores activated. The Niagara chip was created by Sparc licensee Afara Systems, which Sun bought several years ago and which was working on streaming network processors similar to what Movidis has been doing for VOD servers.

Goldsholl says that the company is working on benchmark tests for SSL encryption and decryption as well as network storage performance, and then will test Web and other infrastructure workloads on the Revolution x16 box. It will be interesting to see how this MIPS-Debian box stacks up. Cavium is also working on adding features to its processors and ramping up the performance, and Goldsholl says that Movidis will certainly be able to keep up with the competition in terms of performance increases going forward.