SGI introduces Origin 400 blade system
SGI, known for its high-performance computing equipment, has launched an integrated workgroup blade system designed for the SME market.
With the Tuesday launch of the Origin 400 system, the California-headquartered company aims to take the capabilities of its existing Origin large enterprise products and tailor them for smaller businesses as well as branch offices of large firms.
The Origin 400 functions as a web server, applications server, email server and back-end database server, and offers virtualisation support via VMWare ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. It scales to six dual-socket compute blades and 14 2.5-inch SAS hard drives within a 6U mounted enclosure. It is based on Intel's Xeon 5600 series processors, which will provide up to 72 cores per SGI system.
The Xeon 5600 family was also launched on Tuesday. Intel is positioning these processors for customers who have been putting off server upgrades. Some research firms have recently said the level of server upgrades is about to increase. The 5600 offers a high server consolidation ratio and two new features — Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI) and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) — that enable better security for virtualised environments.
SGI is adopting Xeon 5600 processors across its range of scale-out servers because of its performance and density improvements, the company's chief executive Mark Barrenechea said in a statement. The company said that core density is increased by 50 percent and overall raw performance by 60 percent as a result of the new processors.
"Origin 400 establishes a new bar for performance, manageability and ease of use as small and medium-sized enterprises struggle to keep pace with increasingly complex IT infrastructures," said Tony Carrozza, senior vice president of worldwide sales for SGI, in the statement.
The Origin 400 is available immediately, but pricing information was not available.