Rackable takes SGI name after purchase

Rackable Systems, a data center hardware specialist, is adopting SGI as its new name, after completing its acquisition of Silicon Graphics Inc.

Good-bye, old logos...

The company announced the move Monday. Its $42.5 million purchase of the supercomputing company was granted court approval on April 30 and closed on Friday.

For the deal, Rackable created a subsidiary called Silicon Graphics International. That subsidiary then acquired the assets and liabilities of Silicon Graphics Inc. Rackable will now be known as "a Silicon Graphics International entity," and Silicon Graphics International will be branded as SGI.

The new SGI's portfolio will include high-performance products for medium- and large-scale data centers and high-performance computing. The board of the company is composed of senior executives from both Rackable and the former Silicon Graphics Inc., with Rackable CEO Mark Barrenechea remaining the company's chief executive.

...Hello, new logo.

In a blog post Monday, Barrenechea wrote that the Rackable name will live on as the brand for SGI's x86 cluster compute products. "Rackable will join our other industry-recognized brands--such as ICE Cube, Altix, InfiniteStorage, CloudRack, MicroSlice, Origin, and VUE--to comprise the new SGI," he wrote.

Fremont, Calif.-based Rackable was started in 1999, but Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics Inc. goes back to 1981, when it was founded by a group of Stanford University alumni. Silicon Graphics Inc., which has major contracts with clients such as the U.S. Department of Defense, went into Chapter 11 administration at the start of April and was immediately snapped up by Rackable.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[SIGHUP]

That is stupid to change their name. Rackable Systems was making a name for itself and a name that everyone knew what they did. Now everyone will be like? SGI? I thought they went out of business.

[supoman]

The beginning of the end of SGI was when they killed Irix and started using NT. Windows anything is not synonymous with a high performance workstation. That's when researchers started working on their own ports to Linux. Didn't take a genious to figure out if you were working on something like the Super Colider that you wouldn't want to use Windows!!

[viper396]

You don't know what you are talking about. Staying with Irix would have only bankrupted them sooner. In the end the only thing that kept them going this long was their switch to NT.

No matter what OS they used SGI had nothing viable going for them except their name. Other companies were doing the same thing for cheaper. Overall cost is what sways.

[ewelch]

My computer scientist friend who works at the Salk Institute told me (when we were waiting for Star Trek to start) that the only thing holding OS X back from being the high powered workstation OS that it could be is the lack of powerful enough graphics cards. "OSX is so much better than anything else, it's a shame we can't use it," he said. So he uses BSD and Linux for his multi-processor projects, but a MacBook Pro with OS X for everything else.

This from a guy that IBM uses to stress test the biggest baddest super computers. (Deep Blue, etc.)

SGI used to hold sway. They ruined their position by going NT. Windows is never going to be the future, because it never proved itself in the past.

[viper396]

What a petty and trivial way to start yet another useless Windows vs other OS debate. Using the "I have a friend.." or "I know somebody..." prefix on a story is a sure sign that whatever you said is complete BS.