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Rackable Buying SGI Assets For $25M?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the still-not-totally-sure-about-this-one dept.

UnanimousCoward was one of many people to submit a story that might be an April Fools day joke, except that I don't think it is. Rackable Systems has announced that it is buying SGI for the bargain basement price of $25M. Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation. And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.

12 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Unless the SEC's in on It ... by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative

    a story that might be an April Fools day joke

    Hey I myself enjoy taking a joke too far but if this is an April Fool's Day joke, I must confess I would have jumped out and yelled "surprise" before filing a merger and acquisition notice with the Security and Exchange Commission of the United States Government. I hear they don't take too kindly to joke 8-Ks.

    From the SEC Filing:

    On April 1, 2009, Rackable Systems, Inc. ("Rackable"), a Delaware corporation, announced that it had signed an Asset Purchase Agreement (the "Agreement") to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("SGI"), including SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries and operations, other than certain assets unrelated to the ongoing business. The Agreement, dated March 31, 2009, was made and entered into by and among Rackable, SGI and certain SGI subsidiaries. The Agreement has been approved by the respective boards of directors of Rackable and SGI.

    Under the terms of the Agreement, Rackable or a subsidiary of Rackable, will acquire the assets for a purchase price of approximately $25 million in cash, $10 million of which will be placed in escrow and available to Rackable following the closing to reimburse Rackable for payments and expenses made or incurred in connection with certain tax matters. In addition, Rackable will assume certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets. Following the signing of the Agreement, SGI and certain of its affiliated entities located in the U.S. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition and motions to approve the Agreement.

    Also note that they had planned to repurchase up to $40 million worth of shares but it looks like instead they're opting to acquire SGI. What that means to you day traders and quant fund managers, who knows?

    And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.

    The world doesn't screech to a halt because a bunch of nerds are slapping their knees and pulling pranks; here's evidence someone got something done yesterday.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  2. "little cooler than an SGI workstation..." by Assmasher · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Right up until you found out how bad Irix could be ;)...

    Very sexy hardware, terrible *nix implementation. I once had (sigh) an IR2 in my office for 6 months. I don't think I slept at home the entire time.

    --
    Loading...
    1. Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." by robthebloke · · Score: 5, Informative

      The nix part was ok, IIRC it was the god awful GUI implementation that really let it down. The hardware was awesome for apps like Maya/Softimage etc, however you had to learn ways of working that avoided the GUI entirely. Oh, and re-installing irix was as simple as constructing an atomic bomb in your garden shed, from 2 paperclips, some woodglue, and a dead panda, whilst your arms are tied behind your back. Actually. Now i think about it. You're right, .... irix was shit.

      Even now, Maya still has some legacy hangovers from those days: Ctrl+Space to remove the GUI. Ctrl+M to remove the menus. Space to bring up the 'hotbox', which is basically a menu rendered using openGL (about the only thing Sgi's could do really well).

      Even now, I'm still staggered by how far Sgi managed to fall from grace. Mind you, i think Apple learnt a lot from SGI about how to switch to Intel processors successfully. The way SGI did it made every single one of their existing clients run to the hills, and they never looked back.

    2. Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." by flaming-opus · · Score: 4, Informative

      This is why SGI finally fell apart; you guys are all talking about SGI workstations. SGI hasn't been in the workstation business for years. There hasn't been a workstation business for years. HP,IBM,Sun sell workstations, but they are just rebranded PCs. Dec,DG,EnS,Intergraph,Appalo: all defunct.

      Lately SGI has been selling low-end HPC clusters and a few mid-range altix machines. (and one really big one at nasa) The HPC business is a really difficult place to make money. SGI has never been good at keeping their operating costs down. Compared to their competition, they always seemed to employ a lot of people, and have a lot of irons in the fire, most of which never panned out.

      SGI has always loved to engineer their way around problems; In a mature market one makes money by engineering a solution to a problem and then licensing it out to the rest of the world until it becomes an industry standard. Numalink could have been what infiniband is now. Infinitereality could have been what geforce is now. CXFS could have been what lustre is. XIO could be PCIe. SGI wanted to control it though. They tried to keep it all under the tent.

  3. Re:Wow by robthebloke · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't have that many peanuts unfortunately...

  4. should really have waited to submit by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not that I didn't preview or anything, but I could have also linked in the SGI customer letter. Rackable is getting SGI without getting their debt.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. The Natural Rise & Fall of Empires by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation.

    Time was that there was little cooler than your company having its own Cray machine.

    Time was that there was little cooler than having the latest Sega game system in your home.

    Time was that there was little cooler than to puts around on a BSA motorcycle in front of your friends.

    Time was that there was little cooler than to be a citizen of Rome ... Wait, I'm sorry, what was the point of this exercise again? To wax nostalgic about the inevitable fall of empires?

    --
    My work here is dung.
  6. Re:Head hurts parsing this sentence... by LaminatorX · · Score: 4, Informative

    You have parsed the sentance correctly. The construction is an idiomatic one, typically used by older folks looking back on how times have changed or younger folks affecting a similar attitude.

  7. Re:Wouldn't surprise me if it were true. by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

    BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song. These machines are still workhorses for 3D rendering, audio and video production.

    These machines suck down the power like motherfuckers by today's standards. You can get more power in a refurb laptop. Mine allegedly costs around $1200 that way and has a Quadro 2700M 512MB with absolutely absurd memory bandwidth... the machine itself has T9400, 2GB exp. to 4GB, 250GB 7200RPM, DVD+/-R/W w/LS, 1680x1050 17", VGA+HDMI, 24bit/96khz audio, super pissed off ricoh SD/etc reader... How much will you pay for electricity in the summer months? I can run my system on one of those harbor freight solar panel setups and a $20 inverter (Thanks for the heads up Lumpy.)

    Please, people, I know the love of antique hackery but let those systems die. They aren't going to save you anything in the long run. Speaking as someone who has owned SGI machines, VME suns, an Alphastation, and whole herds of Apollo DN-series and IBM RT-series machines, let them go on to that great goodnight at the recycler. As it is I still have an Indy R4400SC with a marginal power supply (or something) and a camera cluttering up my storage area. Even that thing draws more than my laptop. Food for thought.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  8. Surprised? by plasticsquirrel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's definitely not an April Fools joke. But does this really surprise anyone? They're just going the way of DEC and just about every other Unix vendor. The only ones that are still around and thriving are Sun, IBM, and HP. But those too are slowly dying the old Unix death, done in by Linux I suppose.

    When I was younger, I could have only dreamed of having one of these venerable Unix systems. But now that they're finally cheap and I can afford them, Linux now makes them seem very outdated and proprietary in nature. Kind of a sad thing to see old dreams die, but in this case I think it's also a step forward.

    It's always seemed like such a shame to see old well-designed machines built around Unix (rather than just generic PC's) become a thing of the past, though. Good quality hardware and a machine that looked and ran like it meant business, with fast disks and lots of RAM... :-)

    --
    Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
  9. it was the logo wot killed it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It was obviously going to be all downhill for SGI when they replaced their cool cube logo with the useless text logo....

  10. Re:The decay of workstations. by robthebloke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's also the Nvidia effect. All the old SGI engineers who worked on OpenGL and SGI hardware (Mark Kilgard etc al) all ended up working for Nvidia. Around the time of the geforce1, pretty much every single white paper and tech demo that came out of Nvidia was written by an ex-SGI employee. It was only going to be a matter of time before nvidia overtook SGI, and it's another reason why nvidia's openGL support has always been so strong.