By William Fellows
Following the launch of its Windows NT desktops, Silicon Graphics Inc is expected to take its plans for what are suspected to be NT servers to Wall Street next week. Merrill Lynch expects SGI will begin to offer Intel-based NT servers fitted with the company’s highly-scalable ccNUMA Spider interconnect technology for clustering large numbers of distributed processors into a single logical engine. The news will come as no great surprise to Computergram readers. Last October SGI described a plan to make the transition from the MIPS RISC chip to use to Intel’s IA-64 architecture for its Unix SMP servers by creating new versions of its Origin server line by 2000 that will be upgradeable to IA-64 (CI No 3,517). It said that it had already figured out how to support both processors on its ccNUMA Spider interconnect. Several companies, including Sequent Computer Systems Inc, are expected to begin experimenting with commercial implementations of distributed shared memory NT servers using features in Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 2000. Whether SGI gets the jump on these is unclear although there’s been speculation that SGI has talked about licensing to Microsoft some features of its modular Irix Unix operating system for NT. Certainly it will enable SGI to sell its specialist technologies, until now used largely by the scientific, academic and imaging industries, in the commercial space. Former CEO Ed McCracken used to like to say that SGI builds computers to make money not to count it. But if new CEO Rick Belluzzo is to succeed in pulling SGI out of its nose-dive then it must begin to tap lucrative commercial markets the company has not traditionally targeted. Belluzzo has already created a 200-person group that will focus on six core industries; communications, energy, entertainment, government, manufacturing and science. Meantime SGI’s Irix Unix is currently which is being enhanced with features from the Stanford University Hive project and is being ported to IA-64 implemented in a big-endian byte-ordering format. However because there is no binary compatibility between MIPS and IA-64 (unlike Hewlett-Packard Co’s PA-RISC), switching architectures is going to be more of a wrench for SGI users. It sounds as if SGI’s still working on the spin for the new servers. Its Unix server group told us that it would be presenting its strategy to Wall Street next Thursday but that plans had not been finalized. Beyond the already reported plan to share some APIs for application development purposes across all SGI platforms, the company’s Cray supercomputing unit said it the new NT servers are nothing to do with it. SGI needs the street to look favorably on its plans as it expected to lose $89m on sales of nearly $3bn in its fiscal year through June, according to Merrill Lynch. The brokerage says SGI’s server business, which accounts for about two-thirds of profits, is showing life. It says SGI plans to put most of the sales force on servers entering the next fiscal year. The Cray portion accounts for about 15% of servers and is becoming less and less important.
