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SGI Lives On, In Name At Least
Hugh Pickens writes "In a surprise corporate move, after Rackable Systems received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, the company announced on Monday that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc. The revival of the SGI brand will certainly please people in Silicon Valley with a historical bent, as SGI has been one of the area's true icons. However, some consider this a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years. Executives hope the name change will help it expand its business overseas, where SGI is a better-known brand. The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, says Rackable's president and CEO. 'There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers.'"
Let's see - Caldera bought the remains of SCO, rebranded themselves SCO and tried to carry on with SCOs business model - which had already been shown to be at deaths' door as it was.
Sounds very similar. What next? SGI sues everyone who uses Linux?
Although the SGI "brand" is still widely recognized, I am not convinced it has a lot of value. After all, if SGI had a whole lot of happy customers (left) then it would not be in the situation of being sold to WhatsItsName.
I am not sure I would want to chance the name of my company to something that makes people say, "Oh, wow, you're still around?" (especially given that I work for one of those)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Yes. Both of you.
Does this mean IRIX will be developed again? I'm not seeing any info one way or the other.
As a Linux and BSD guy, I'm pretty ignorant about IRIX other than the MIPS support. Does IRIX do anything innovative that makes developing it worthwhile?
No. And I'm fairly certain of that.
IRIX was discontinued in 2006 by SGI - http://www.sgi.com/support/mips_irix.html - and most of the cool technical features of IRIX were ported over to Linux ages ago - like xfs http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/. Actually, the correct question is will this new, improved and revived SGI continue to support the open source efforts of the old SGI regime? http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ . I don't see a point in reviving IRIX, but there was a lot of OSS work done out of that shop and I'd hate to see it disappear. Right?
http://www.bistolas.net
I like this: http://www.rackable.com/sgi/sgi_logo_guidelines6.pdf ...extremely specific usage and typesetting guidelines for the new logo which are then comprehensively broken by the last page of the same document :)
Rackable is a small server vendor with revenues in the hundreds of millions while they big boys in that space (HP, IBM, Dell, Sun) are in the billions.
They build x86 based rack servers. They're focus seems to have been in high density rack systems. I think one of their first/biggest innovation was creating a half depth chassis so you could put two servers back to back in a 1u space leaving a hot air plenum in the middle to keep things from getting overheated. They also have 12V Motherboards like Google uses on their systems.
The goal of Rackable isn't to sell you one x86 server, it's to give you a solution including a rack full of their servers. That seems to have also been the focus of SGI lately. They went from big single systems to clustered super computers. So the deal appears to make sense. I'm sure there's a lot of good talent and patents that Rackable could use to help it become a bigger player.
In 2007 Rackable's 4 biggest clients were Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook.
The name change might be good because SGI is a more recognizable name in the industry. I think some people see Rackable as an x86 server vendor but they're really a server farm vendor.
The past couple of years haven't been great for Rackable with some pretty big losses in proportion to their revenue so they need to make some bigger moves and this might do the trick.
Dual Opteron < $600
There was that 3d filesystem navigator that was used in the Jurassic Park movie.
That was fsn, which has been cloned.
That might get peoples attention.
My daughters Geo metro turned into a DELL powergeo
I removed the big 3" DELL badges from the racks and bolted them in pace of the Geo ones on her car.. She get's strange comments from classmates all the time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Posting anonymously 'cos I was involved.
The killing of the Alpha was a rather long and tortured affair. It also was a really sad day when the people who made the decision had to accept that their architecture was dead.
Let's be honest here, I loved the Alpha and it was a phenomenal architecture for its time. However, by 1998 its time was actually ending anyway. Realistically, other CPU architectures like MIPS were chomping at our heels in our opinion. They were rapidly catching up with us in terms of performance for the cost of the CPU fabbing (note that I said cost, not retail price).
We had started work on a next generation architecture shortly before Compaq came in, but we never could quite get the performance out of it that we felt we needed to keep ahead of the next generation of competitor's CPU's. We wanted to define a 5 year architecture; one that could scale rapidly in performance while keeping our development costs relatively low... but as we started to work on it we realized already that it was going to be really hard to create even a 3 year architecture, let alone 5.
By the time Compaq came in, there was already rumbling in the halls that Alpha was in trouble... this wasn't news to anyone. As a result, when Compaq did arrive and told us their plans we basically had only one realistic choice; shutter the Alpha division.
If we'd moved ahead with the next gen architecture, it would've been the Alpha equivalent of a Pentium 4; kludged to improve clock speed at the expense of creating an architecture that was fundamentally a dead end at day 1. Intel could soak this up because of volume... DEC never had a chance. We didn't sell that kind of volume, ever... and we didn't have the marketing muscle to catch up. As a result, we couldn't create an "Alpha IV"... it would've killed us anyway.
In the opinion of those who were present at the meetings when the future direction was set, Alpha wasn't killed, rather it was euthanized. It was better to go out in a blaze of glory than to fade into irrelevance.
On the bright side, many of the engineers I used to work with now have great jobs that they love... some working for Intel, but many working in what they love; small boutique CPU's and embedded systems.