SGI: Discussion

They seem to have some customers at least..

http://www.copansystems.com/

Am I excited yet..? Or even morbidly interested yet..?

Isn't this the part where people chime in about how stupid SGI is for doing anything at all besides IRIX/MIPS, how capitalism is the worst approach to economics ever, how we're all doomed, how...

Oh, never mind. I'm just going to hide in my cave full of canned goods and ammunition, and finish preparing for the inevitable.

Paging Hamei...

It's not even SGI so it doesn't matter ... they may as well buy KFC for all the relevance it has to us.

wow, i totally missed that one.

hamei is partly right. this acquisition is not an sgi preogative, it's clearly rackable strategy. COPAN is known for building 'green' storage systems. which is a big strategy driving rackable technology (what there is of it, packaging in my mind has little or no IP). the systems operate by maintaining a certain percentage of the drives spun down to reduce the power foot print of the system. this works fairly well since many, if not all, workloads exhibit strong locality of reference, and large skew. what does this mean? a large portion of IO is too a small percentage of devices, and within those devices there is a small percentage of data accessed. the trade of you have to make is in not being able to take advantage of wide striping. as a result you have a power efficient system with low performance, with a small number of useful power states. this reduces the applicability of the system as a whole to specific purposes. it's a pretty novel implementation so far, but soon will become just another feature of other systems as green gets more momentum, which is coming like a tidal wave. so this is a marginal purchase over all at best.

Would that make their new motto "finger lickin' good"?

part of rackable's strategy seems to be buying dead companies super cheap and diversifying. hopefully the products and technology they bought, that weren't doing well with the strategy that killed them, are applicable to rackable's new strategy which seems to be focusing on selling into cloud storage and the like.


doesn't seem right to call them sgi since, well... they're not.

don't like it either but the 'old' sgi lacked exactly that kind of behavior. maybe it's working for them for now.
looking at apple, ibm or sap shows what good pr and buying other companies can do ...

that aside the client list on their site looks quite good

the thing with client lists and HW vendors is that a customer asks about system, the vendor offers to let them use one on evaluation. Bing the customer goes on the client list. the customer say "eh, it was ok, but not really worth the money" and sends it back. does their name get removed from the client list? ....no.

COPAN was basically bankrupt. you don't get that way unless you're failing somehow. a HW vendor fails when they don't make enough margins on their systems. COPAN did not sell a lot of stuff, they did not make great margins. they went out of business because of it.

does that mean they suck? no. they solve a problem. However, that problem doesn't justify an entire company, maybe a product from a company with a larger product line will do. perhaps rackable will make some money off selling them as a storage option.

I get the impression they are trying to build an empire out of cow shit - and fast.

The market loves it, for reasons I can't figure out (but am getting a nice profit from)

The "old" sgi made some great acquisitions that in the end ended up helping them not at all. MIPS, Alias/Wavefront, Cray Research, all of which (under their new corporate umbrellas) are still chugging along...