SGI racks up new server
- By Dan Caterinicchia, Dan Caterinicchia
- May 24, 2000
Silicon Graphics Inc. this week unveiled its new 1450 server, a slimmer,
faster version of the 1000 series unveiled last summer that is about half
the height of its predecessors and better-suited for rack configurations.
Its compact size would make it appealing to agencies with space concerns,
said Scott Fitzpatrick, product manager of the 1450. "You can pack of a
lot computing power into a very confined space," he said.
A standard rack could hold nine of the servers, into which up to 36
Intel Corp. Pentium III 700 MHz Xeon processors and more than a terabyte
of storage can be packed, he said.
Running Linux and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT or Windows 2000 operating
systems, the 1450 is targeted at data center customers who want better system
performance to run business applications, implement clustering solutions
or run active intranet, Internet and e-commerce sites, Fitzpatrick said.
All of SGI's 1000 series servers ship with the company's ProPack for
Linux 1.3, an installable, added layer to the Linux operating system. SGI
ProPack includes technology recently released to the open-source software
community, which can be downloaded at www.oss.sgi.com.
"The scalability and manageability that Linux offers and the fact you
can download this information for free as opposed to paying $1,000 for it"
is another potential selling point in the federal space, Fitzpatrick said.
Some other features of the 1450 include high-speed memory that can be
upgraded to Gigabit Ethernet speeds, up to 8G of RAM and eight PCI expansion
slots.
NASA and the Ohio Supercomputer Center are two of SGI's current federal
customers for servers.
Pricing for the new servers starts at $7,766, and they are available
on the GSA schedule, a company spokesman said.