It seems that data centres in a box are taking off in a big way, but SGI lead the field purely because they’ve chosen the best name for their offering – behold the ICE Cube.

SGI® (NASDAQ:SGI) announced today that it recently shipped its ICE Cube™ modular data center to i/o Data Centers, a leading colocation and data center services provider based in Phoenix, Arizona, to address i/o clients’ evolving data center needs. The ICE Cube is secured, powered and connected to i/o Data Centers’ network.

The specs are pretty impressive – an ICE Cube can hold up to 2,800 servers, fielding 22,400 cores. Or you can it it out with up to 11 Petabytes of storage.

With the rising cost of deploying data centres, and the increase in hype around cloud computing, we should be seeing a big increase in the deployments of these sorts of solutions.

John West over at insideHPC has landed an exclusive interview with SGI’s CEO, Mark Barrenechea.

The article is a great read, and John gets some good information on the new SGI’s product roadmap, including news that the Silicon Graphics visualisation technology (the impressive VUE suite) still has a future.

Perhaps the best news is that SGI’s plan for an Altix system based on Intel’s Xeon processors, as opposed to Itanium, is still coming down the line. Itanium has always been a step backwards from MIPs, and Xeon beats it hands down in the price/performance stakes, optimised code or no. With SC09 coming up in November could we be seeing a product announcement?

Mark also has a blog over at http://ceoblog.rackable.com/ which is also worth your time. Another big positive for the new company – the CEO is happy to communicate openly on his company’s website, something Silicon Graphics should have paid attention to many years ago.

NASA have been playing about with their Silicon Graphics supercomputers, using new models for more accurate climate change predication. By mapping the faces of a cube to the surface of a sphere, they’ve worked out that they get a higher degree of accuracy and more realistic modelling.

Climate modelling is one of the most resource intensive compute jobs you can carry out. NASA have been using their Silicon Graphics Columbia supercomputer for the initial simulation, and then moved to the more powerful SGI Pleiades installation.

You can read more – as well as watch a cool video with details of the visualisation – at this page on NASA’s site.

Perhaps not quite in the way many of us would have hoped, but SGI is once again trading on the NASDAQ. This is also one of the final steps of Rackable’s transformation into Silicon Graphics International.

Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK – News) announced today the completion of its legal name change to “Silicon Graphics International Corp.” The company also announced today that it will change its NASDAQ stock ticker symbol from “RACK” to “SGI.” The stock ticker change has gone into effect for the trading community on Monday, May 18, 2009.

Full press release on Yahoo! Finance can be found here.

The latest on SGI and Rackable has come through via a press release from … SGI. Yes, as I speculated when the deal was first announced () Rackable are following Tera’s lead (when Tera bought the bones of Cray from Silicon Graphics) and have rebranded, keeping the familiar SGI name.

The headline news is that the XE products will be merged with Rackable’s existing x86 clusters (which was their core competency) and sold under the Rackable brand.

Existing high end techologies – like Altix, VUE, ICE, Infinite Storage etc. – will remain. The company is also positioning itself as a ‘solutions provider’ – moving away from just selling tin, which should hopefully push sales, growth, and revenue.

At the moment, the main SGI site redirects to Rackable’s website, although things like Techpubs are still live and reachable. Customers should be re-assured that the product lines will continue with renewed vigour – how this affects the hobbyist community, independent consultancies, and IRIX users remains to be seen.

You can read the full press release here.