SGI have announced that their earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be held on the 4th November at 2pm Pacific Time.

The public is invited to listen to a live web cast of the call on the Investor
Relations section of the Company’s website at investors.sgi.com. A replay of the
web cast will be available approximately two hours after the conclusion of the
call and will remain available until the next earnings call. An audio replay of
the conference call will also be made available approximately two hours after
the conclusion of the call. The audio replay will remain available for five days
and can be accessed by dialing 719-457-0820 or 888-203-1112 and entering the
confirmation code: 9725418.

This promises to be an interesting event, giving us a chance to see how things have developed since Rackable took over the bankrupt remains of Silicon Graphics earlier this year.

SGI today announced the first Rackable x86 scale-out servers to support both on-board Quad Data Rate (QDR) 40Gb InfiniBand and 10Gb Ethernet connections. Available immediately, the new servers also leverage advanced memory capabilities and Intel Xeon 5500 series processors to deliver advanced processing performance for applications that demand higher performance.

Read more at HPCWire.

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.

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.