I stumbled upon the SGI website this morning, and it seems they have revamped their web presence in order to integrate the two former organizations. Previously, Rackable and Silicon Graphics kept separate product websites, each via its own web redirect. As of this morning, SGI.com points directly to a consolidated homepage with consolidated product overviews.
All in all, this seems relatively benign right? Check out the ICE Cube product page and/or the technology partners page. What caught my eye was the mention of IBM as a major technology partner. Plot thickens. More specifically, it seems SGI has integrated IBM blade technology into their ICE Cube containerized data center line. From the product page:
SGI’s new ICE Cube with IBM BladeCenter® solution will enable end users to realize the best in class density and efficiency associated with ICE Cube with the ruggedness, reliability and manageability offered by BladeCenter T & HT product lines. BladeCenter specific configurations of ICE Cube will allow Rackable Systems’ enterprise customers to reach densities up to 1344 dual socket, quad core Intel Xeon blades or 672 quad socket, dual core Opteron blades. In addition, customers will benefit from broad portfolio of IO Fabrics, Server Blades, Manageability products like AMM (Advanced Management Module) & IBM Director which are part of the IBM BladeCenter solution ecosystem.
This is terribly interesting. I don’t seem to recall [the original] Rackable announcing support for IBM products in their containers. I also don’t recall any specific press releases centric upon this partnership. For more info, check out the new web digs for SGI at www.sgi.com.
Actually, the IBM relationship with Rackable was established awhile ago (previous to SGI buy). IBM is OEMing Rackable’s containers (excl servers). Fast way for IBM to get into the container market. Makes Rackable…er…SGI an obvious take-out play for IBM though.