Targeting Growth

With a host of new Linux products aimed at expanding SGI's presence in technical and enterprise computing, new CEO Dennis McKenna puts market driven initiatives in overdrive.

High-Performing. Scalable. Technologically Superior. Solutions.

That's not just the model for Silicon Graphics' broad line of servers, clusters, supercomputers and storage solutions. It's also a model for the company that SGI is rapidly - very rapidly - becoming.

This much has been clear since January, when turn-around specialist Dennis McKenna became SGI's new chief executive. In a push to remake the company into a thriving, profitable market force, McKenna has left no part of SGI's global business untouched. Within his first 30 days, McKenna enacted a company-wide reorganization aimed at cutting operational costs. And in May, SGI moved to shrug off its crippling legacy debt by filing for Chapter 11 protection.

"A lot of these decisions weren't easy to make," says McKenna. "But they will put SGI on a firmer financial footing. And from the top down, we are driving responsiveness, flexibility and accountability throughout the company."

Mining Untapped Opportunities

With its organizational and financial retooling continuing, SGI set its sights on ensuring that products and services align with customer needs. After determining early on to consolidate SGI's compute and visualization product lines, McKenna turned the attention of product teams toward mining untapped opportunities.

"SGI servers, storage and software solutions have enormous competencies when it comes to working with massive data sets, and data sets are growing larger in every single market," McKenna says. "This suggests that there is opportunity not only in our traditional customer environments, but in new ones as well."

The first growth challenge, says McKenna, is to expand SGI's presence in existing markets, and within existing customer sites: "We can greatly extend our reach by showing customers the breadth and depth of our server, storage and software solutions. What's unique about SGI is that, throughout our product lines, we produce faster time to results. That capability drives all kinds of benefits for customers, stability, reliability and repeatability. This is a compelling lower cost of ownership."

Those benefits come even easier, says McKenna, when customers rely on SGI not just to run specific applications, but as a foundation platform throughout their workflow. For instance, an SGI customer already running computational fluid dynamics (CFD) or computer-aided engineering (CAE) applications on a large SGI® Altix® resource could deploy and manage its technical database on a mid-range Altix cluster system and integrate the entire solution via a multi-terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage SAN. "We now have the ability to provide customers more complete workflow solutions.

Meanwhile, SGI is laying the groundwork for a push into new markets. "Companies are seeking the kind of platforms that allow them to manage huge databases, but they want solutions integrated to solve their problems," notes McKenna. "This presents us with a terrific opportunity, and we're moving forward with solutions that serve as ideal platforms for the kind of data-intensive applications that are creating challenges in today's enterprise."

McKenna also points to the recent certification of SGI Altix for SAP applications and constant improvements in Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) as crucial milestones in the company's push into enterprise environments with robust Linux solutions.

To advance its growth-oriented strategy, SGI has unveiled a series of sweeping product announcements.

SGI® Altix® XE: Transforming Clusters into Integrated Solutions

SGI Altix XE is a new value-priced family of Linux® OS-based servers and factory-integrated clusters powered by the new Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5100. The new systems are the first Xeon processor-based products from SGI - and unlike competing systems typically sold as one-off clusters, SGI Altix XE solutions come custom-configured to optimize leading applications.

SGI's new servers pack a total of four Xeon processor cores and support up to 32GB of memory in each compute node. And they are the only Intel Xeon processor-based clusters to come with SGI's renowned technical support and vast expertise in data-intensive applications, including those used in life and environmental sciences, media, engineering analysis, and the enterprise.

As part of its aggressive solution sell, SGI also plans to offer application-specific cluster bundles featuring the industry's most popular vertical applications. The first of many is a customized rendering bundle for special effects and game development.

New Altix® 450 and Faster Altix® 4700: The Power of Dual-Core

SGI bolsters its mid-range offerings with SGI® Altix® 450, a new blade server fueled by next-generation dual-core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. The new Altix 450 delivers up to 2.5 times the performance of the current Altix® 350® server at a lower system cost. Altix 450 servers can be configured to maximize density, I/O or memory, or mixed to accommodate any workflow.

On the high end, SGI is equipping its Altix® 4700 blade server line with new dual-core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. The new Linux® systems will deliver at least double the performance of today's award-winning Altix® servers at no additional system cost to users, while drawing less power and offering more density and flexibility for demanding, data-intensive applications. This lowers the cost of owning SGI systems today and eases concerns about the financial impact of upgrades and expansions in the future.

The Trusted Source for Comprehensive Solutions
These latest products, says McKenna, dovetail perfectly with SGI's mission to help customers transform data into knowledge that can accelerate discovery, engineering, analysis and innovation.

"Now more than ever," he notes, "SGI is a reliable single source for comprehensive solutions that deliver value at every level of an organization or enterprise. From national labs to IT data centers, SGI has what customers need to solve the difficult, data-intensive problems they face every day."