Saving energy with open source

With oil approaching $80/barrel that is no longer so clever. Those old boxes were energy hogs.

So Movidas  Movidis Inc., a Santa Cruz Santa Barbara start-up, has gotten a good reception to its MIPS-based Revolution x16, which runs a version of the MIPS processor from Cavium Networks.

The product, which was first introduced at LinuxWorld last year, is a blade server that pulls just 60 watts of energy, against 300 watts for a dual-Xeon box.

When running as a black box pulling down Web pages, CEO Ken Goldscholl says the Revolution x16 takes just 2% of the Xeon's energy load, a 98% savings.

"We got this from one of our customers in Asia. They didn’t have access to much electricity, they saw our server running Linux and a simple executable.

"There are many applications you can run as a black box, and Web server is one of them. For basic static Web pages, they’re using lighttpd."

Thus Web hosts, who don't have to be sold on Linux, can fight what I call The War Against Oil by simply swapping servers. So far, Goldscholl said, most of his interest is coming from Asian and European outfits open "to non-86 products from small companies."

At LinuxWorld you can see the x16 running a full LAMP suite, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), lighttpd, Apache SSL, and a browser-based user interface for managing the server and all of the applications.

Tell 'em Dana sent you.