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For Vividon Inc., making waves in the video server and content delivery business means harnessing a highly complex software technology it says will help it blow away current streaming media speeds.
The Sudbury, Mass.-based company with roots in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is alpha testing a new high performance content delivery system (CDS) that uses what Vividon describes as a specially optimized interface for video streams. Vividon contends that it will soon be launching a five-rack unit system it claims has an aggregate stream capacity up to eight times larger than competing streaming solutions.
By claiming it is capable of vastly outperforming other video streaming solution providers, Vividon is picking a competitive fight not only with much larger server vendors but also with such fast-moving smaller players as Fremont, Calif.-based Entera Inc., which recently was acquired by CacheFlow Inc. and has customers such as Axient Communications. Another noteworthy competitor is Infolibria Inc. in nearby Waltham, whose backers include General Electric and Nortel Networks.
The team at Vividon is leveraging its expertise in software tools known as exokernals, what Peter Christy, research director and research fellow at Jupiter Communications Silicon Valley, calls highly innovative software for delivering streaming media.
Christy notes that most operating system kernels perform two intertwined functions: protection against one program from damaging other programs or overall system behavior, and functional abstractions such as letting a program deal with a file operation rather than the raw disk data. In contrast, an exokernel focuses only on the protection issues, "and does that in a way that permits the applications to do optimal device management such as optimal streaming delivery," Christy says.
As a grad student at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in the mid-1990's, Thomas Pinckney, Vividon's founder and chief technology officer, was part of the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems (PDOS) Group where the MIT Exokernal Operating System took shape. Pinckney produced papers on exokernal-related topics such as "Hierarchical Untrusted Resource Management" and, "Operating System Extensibility Through Event Capture."
Besides empowering applications as they ride across operating systems, exokernals chop out a lot of OS overhead. They represent a somewhat radical departure from conventional OS architectures in the sense that the focus is on multiplexing hardware, and not providing some sort of hardware glue which constrains the shape, scope and proficiency of the application in question.
"We are building a product around the exokernel concept because we saw both a neat technology hammer, and the application nail to hit with that hammer," Pinckney says. "We sell a hardware product, but we are software wrapped in hardware. Ultimately, we might even see a static web caching box folded together with the Vividon CDS."
"Wait and see what happens. All we can say for sure is that we are in the process of redefining the broadcast industry. The underlying question is at what level will broadband delivery be popular," adds Christy.
Bruce Leichtman, formerly an analyst at the Boston-based Yankee Group, now serves as Vividon's vice president of corporate strategy. He insists that lingering problems with video delivery in particular have warranted the creation of a new type of Internet infrastructure.
"We are not oriented for static caching. Our CDS can process video much more effectively and efficiently than anything else. And we can do all that processing in a very small footprint," Leichtman says. "We have spent the past two years developing a high density, high performing box."
Leichtman notes the competition includes such companies as Inktomi and CacheFlow, while recognizing that Infolibria and Entera also have made powerful impressions in the content delivery field. Pinckney describes his potential customer base as a mix of content delivery networks (CDN's) such as Akamai, iBeam or Adero, backbone networks such as AT&T and Enron, and broadband and narrowband ISPs.
"This is a very confusing space. There is a misperception that the market for content delivery is already crowded," Pinckney says. "What exactly is the video Internet? It is a little too early to say for sure, but it seems that it offers a lot of short form advantages."
"There is no question that there is a market for devices that deliver video streams," says Alex Benik, a Yankee Group analyst specializing in carrier convergence infrastructure. "The real question is timing. Is there a market in the sense that they can enable someone to make money?"
Benik does not see any reason for potential customers and partners to get too well schooled in the intricate world of exokernels.
"Their technology is a differentiator, but people will not be looking too far under the hood," Benik says. "What will draw attention is the fact that Vividon has developed a solution that can be easily integrated into other software and middleware layers in particular."
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