Well, this news came as a bit of a shock. Out of the blue SGI announced they were going in to Chapter 11 (again), closely followed by the news that Rackable were buying the company for a paltry $25m.

You can find the entirety of SGI’s press release at http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/april/rackable.html. At that URL you’ll also find PDFs of the letters sent out to SGI customers, as well as holders of a Silicon Graphics support contract.

John West over at insideHPC has a good post up discussing the Rackable/SGI deal – rather than re-hash everything, I’d recommend you read through his thoughts.

Despite still sailing close to the wind financially, Silicon Graphics still have some very clever tech, which remains in demand. The entire VUE suite is good, CXFS is miles ahead of offerings like Sun’s Lustre, and no-one can do large shared memory systems like SGI.

The question is – can Rackable take this great tech, and SGI’s awesome technical staff, and accomplish what Silicon Graphics have been unable to do – sell them to clients?

Under the disastrous mis-management of that imbecile Rick Belluzo, Silicon Graphics really suffered. Yet, even after he’d bailed, they still retained the arrogant attitude of a much larger company – despite the best efforts of the bulk of their technical staff, and some of their management.

Ignoring the (incredibly vocal and loyal) hobbyist userbase, ignoring business data centres, VARs and OEMs was never going to work. You can’t trade on past glories for too long. That was starting to turn around in the last couple of years, with large systems aimed at businesses and the start of a VAR program, but it was a case of too little, too late.

It’s going to be interesting to see what Rackable’s next move is. Like Compaq swallowing DEC, they’ll be inheriting some longer term government contracts which still require IRIX and MIPS support. Rackable would be foolish to ditch the Silicon Graphics brand – it’s far more established, emotive, and powerful than their own. Will they do a Tera and ‘become’ Silicon Graphics?

With Intel’s Nehalem Xeons now out the door, there’s a credible upgrade path for Altix user’s stuck with Itanium, and Rackable could make some serious coin from that – and land some new business too.

John also has some details on how the deal will work and it looks like we’ve got a short timeframe to hear what’s going to happen.

Interesting times – both literally and in the Chinese curse sense – for both Silicon Graphics, their userbase, and the hobbyist community.

Infostor has an interesting article on effects studios’ gradual migration away from direct attach storage (DAS) to new networked storage solutions. If you’re not that up on the difference between DAS, NAS, and SAN, this is an excellent introduction with some great explanatory diagrams.

When it comes to the storage infrastructure underpinning your digital content operations, you have three choices: direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), or storage area networks (SANs). And in studio environments, the trend is clearly away from DAS toward networked storage architectures such as NAS or SAN.

You can read the full article here.

It looks like SGI have not been able to comply with the listing requirements since the last NASDAQ warning, and have now been issued with a notice that they will be delisted on the 12th March.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. (the “Company”) (NASDAQ: SGIC) announced today that it received a notification letter from The Nasdaq Stock Market on March 3, 2009, indicating that trading of the Company’s common stock will be suspended at the opening of business on March 12, 2009 due to a failure to comply with the market value of publicly held shares requirement for continued listing set forth in Marketplace Rule 4310(c)(3)(B). The Company has requested a hearing before a Nasdaq Listing Qualification Panel to review the Staff Determination. A hearing request will stay the suspension of the Company’s securities and the filing of the Form 25-NSE pending the Panel’s decision.

With many solid government contracts, and some significant large investors who clearly still see the value of R&D at Silicon Graphics, is now the time for the company to take itself private? Or is a merger with NVidia going to be on the cards?

Bad news – more layoffs at Silicon Graphics. This time 9% of the workforce – 120 people. Coming hard on the heels of the announcement that SGI have landed the DoD infrastructure refresh deal, this must be an especially bitter pill for those let go to have to swallow.

The Register has some more details, as well as more rumours and speculation that Silicon Graphics will finally ditch Itanium and stick with 64bit Xeon Nehalem chips. I’ve discussed their Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) before, and I reckon they’ll probably a much more favourable price point (for both SGI and it’s customers) in the big Altix gear.

Silicon Graphics Inc. said Tuesday it signed a $40 million contract with the Department of Defense for compute and storage services, along with options for service and support.

Sunnyvale-based Silicon Graphics (NASDAQ:SGIC) said the systems will be installed at defense research and development sites throughout the United States over the next several years.

Locations include the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Air Force Research Laboratory, Arnold Engineering Development Center, and the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

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