SGI racks up new server

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.