SGI trumps Altix 330 server to build volumes

The latest server offering from Silicon Graphics Systems (SGI), the Altix 330
has a commodity touch to it. This is rather an unusual move from a company that
always focused on mid-range and high-end systems in the high-performance
computing space. Is SGI's new strategy eyeing the mass-market with low-end
high-performance products?

In an exclusive meeting with DQ Channels, at the SGI Partner Enablement
Program (PEP) held in Goa, Prasad Medury, MD, SGI India, said, "The latest
64-bit Itanium-2-based Altix 330 server will be a product not for the low-end
requirement of the engineering and computational science market, but will be
possibly do well even for the database market. This will help us build volumes
and subsequent increase in market share."

The company claims that the Altix 330 will beat all other competing products
in its class hands down with respect to price over performance. The new product
is an addition to the company's other Altix offering, viz the Altix 350, the
Altix 3000, the clusterable offering released couple of years back.

SGI was predominantly known for its specialized servers, storage and
visualization products for the scientific and technical computing market place.
From its inception, SGI has worked closely with the scientific, engineering and
creative user communities and has been a major supplier of computer,
visualization, and storage technology within these markets.

This is probably for the first time in recent years that SGI has positioned
itself with a product that targets the low-end and mid-market place. Besides,
the company also claims the product to score on various features over the
competitor's products. SGI products use its proprietary system-level
architectures utilizing industry standard processors, memory chips, and I/O
devices.

The Altix family of high-performance servers is based on the SGI Numa global
shared memory architecture. It uses 64-bit Linux and Intel Itanium-2 processors.
Altix systems scale from two processors to a 512-processor configuration.
Planned future products will scale to a 1024-processor system.

SGI defines its market in terms of five major industry segments. These
segments are government and defense industry; manufacturing; science (including
biosciences); energy and media. "High-performance computing is what we do
best for these markets, but with the new product offerings that we have now, we
may look in to the possibilities of exploring other market such as the banks and
databases," said Avinash Fotedar, Director Marketing, SGI India.

Worldwide, scientific market contributes the majority of SGI's business,
however, in India the big contribution comes from the manufacturing industry.

SGI's PEP is an annual channel partner program wherein tier-1 and tier-2
partners are updated and educated on SGI's latest product offerings and
technology. Partners are trained on new products with product demos. At the end
of the program, performers (individual and organization) are recognized at an
awards ceremony.

During the meet the company also announced that it will aggressively expand
its channel distribution strategy and indirect sales model. "Currently, the
tier-1 partners contribute 70% of SGI's business in India. We want to change
this by enabling the tier-2 partner to do an equal percentage of business for
SGI over the next few years," said Prasad.

SGI's tier-1 partners include, Tata Elxsi, CMC, PCS Industries, CMS
Computers and most recently Redington (India) as the master reseller. There are
about 35 tier-2 partners for India.

NELSON JOHNY

(The writer was hosted in Goa by SGI India)