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Rackable Buying SGI Assets For $25M?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Apr 02, 2009 07:43 AM
from the still-not-totally-sure-about-this-one dept.
from the still-not-totally-sure-about-this-one dept.
UnanimousCoward was one of many people to submit a story that might be an April Fools day joke, except that I don't think it is. Rackable Systems has announced that it is buying SGI for the bargain basement price of $25M. Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation. And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.
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IBM About To Buy Sun For $7 Billion 699 comments
plasticsquirrel was one of several readers to send in the sharpening rumors that IBM is on the verge of acquiring Sun Microsystems, as we discussed last week. The pricetag is reportedly $7 billion. According to the NYTimes's sources, "People familiar with the negotiations say a final agreement could be announced Friday, although it is more likely to be made public next week. IBM's board has already approved the deal, they said." After the demise of SGI, one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix. If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix. And reader UnanimousCoward adds, "Sun only came into the consciousness of the unwashed masses with the company not being able to get E10K's out the door fast enough in the first bubble. We here will remember some pizza-box looking thing, establishing 32 MB of RAM as a standard, and when those masses were scratching their heads at slogans like 'The Network is the Computer.' Add your favorite Sun anecdote here."
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SGI Lives On, In Name At Least 107 comments
Hugh Pickens writes "In a surprise corporate move, after Rackable Systems received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, the company announced on Monday that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc. The revival of the SGI brand will certainly please people in Silicon Valley with a historical bent, as SGI has been one of the area's true icons. However, some consider this a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years. Executives hope the name change will help it expand its business overseas, where SGI is a better-known brand. The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, says Rackable's president and CEO. 'There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers.'"
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Unless the SEC's in on It ... (Score:5, Informative)
a story that might be an April Fools day joke
Hey I myself enjoy taking a joke too far but if this is an April Fool's Day joke, I must confess I would have jumped out and yelled "surprise" before filing a merger and acquisition notice with the Security and Exchange Commission of the United States Government [sec.gov]. I hear they don't take too kindly to joke 8-Ks.
From the SEC Filing:
On April 1, 2009, Rackable Systems, Inc. ("Rackable"), a Delaware corporation, announced that it had signed an Asset Purchase Agreement (the "Agreement") to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("SGI"), including SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries and operations, other than certain assets unrelated to the ongoing business. The Agreement, dated March 31, 2009, was made and entered into by and among Rackable, SGI and certain SGI subsidiaries. The Agreement has been approved by the respective boards of directors of Rackable and SGI.
Under the terms of the Agreement, Rackable or a subsidiary of Rackable, will acquire the assets for a purchase price of approximately $25 million in cash, $10 million of which will be placed in escrow and available to Rackable following the closing to reimburse Rackable for payments and expenses made or incurred in connection with certain tax matters. In addition, Rackable will assume certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets. Following the signing of the Agreement, SGI and certain of its affiliated entities located in the U.S. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition and motions to approve the Agreement.
Also note that they had planned to repurchase up to $40 million worth of shares but it looks like instead they're opting to acquire SGI. What that means to you day traders and quant fund managers, who knows?
And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.
The world doesn't screech to a halt because a bunch of nerds are slapping their knees and pulling pranks; here's evidence someone got something done yesterday.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
One might also visit SGI's investor relations page to witness their release on the subject [sgi.com]. I'm subscribed to the conference call, and if windows and firefox both stay running until 2:00 PM I expect to have some suits blathering in the background.
should really have waited to submit (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I didn't preview or anything, but I could have also linked in the SGI customer letter. [sgi.com] Rackable is getting SGI without getting their debt.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You beat me to the punch. I was just going to point out that SGI is also in on the joke [sgi.com].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that stock buybacks boost the returns on stock option plans has absolutely nothing to do with their popularity among management of course.
"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Right up until you found out how bad Irix could be ;)...
Very sexy hardware, terrible *nix implementation. I once had (sigh) an IR2 in my office for 6 months. I don't think I slept at home the entire time.
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:5, Informative)
Even now, Maya still has some legacy hangovers from those days: Ctrl+Space to remove the GUI. Ctrl+M to remove the menus. Space to bring up the 'hotbox', which is basically a menu rendered using openGL (about the only thing Sgi's could do really well).
Even now, I'm still staggered by how far Sgi managed to fall from grace. Mind you, i think Apple learnt a lot from SGI about how to switch to Intel processors successfully. The way SGI did it made every single one of their existing clients run to the hills, and they never looked back.
Parent
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:4, Interesting)
The only IRIX I ever installed was 5.3 on an Indigo R3000 that I got with the 17" trinitron and entry graphics for $500, and sold a few months later for the same price. The patch set was literally bigger than the OS. IIRC it took considerably longer to install, too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Lol, I used to absolutely DREAD getting Irix updates from SGI. Every few months a batch of CDs with 5.x/6.x on them would show up and I'd be the poor bastard going through the Indys (we had one for testing purposes), O2s (testing), Octanes (work stations), and our IR2. Made NT4.0 look good, Irix did...
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Made NT4.0 look good, Irix did...
Lol. sad, but so very true....
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know quite what you were doing, but I think odds are You're Doing It Wrong.
Whack the images onto a dist server and use inst's selections file format to specify the locations. Piece of cake.
And installing IRIX (as complained about in a sibling post) consists of copying about 10 lines of source locations into your serial terminal emulator and something like:
install *
keep conflicting
go
It used to take me about five minutes from turning the machine on until IRIX was happily instal
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, and re-installing irix was as simple as constructing an atomic bomb in your garden shed, from 2 paperclips, some woodglue, and a dead panda, whilst your arms are tied behind your back.
So you need to be McGyver?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:5, Informative)
This is why SGI finally fell apart; you guys are all talking about SGI workstations. SGI hasn't been in the workstation business for years. There hasn't been a workstation business for years. HP,IBM,Sun sell workstations, but they are just rebranded PCs. Dec,DG,EnS,Intergraph,Appalo: all defunct.
Lately SGI has been selling low-end HPC clusters and a few mid-range altix machines. (and one really big one at nasa) The HPC business is a really difficult place to make money. SGI has never been good at keeping their operating costs down. Compared to their competition, they always seemed to employ a lot of people, and have a lot of irons in the fire, most of which never panned out.
SGI has always loved to engineer their way around problems; In a mature market one makes money by engineering a solution to a problem and then licensing it out to the rest of the world until it becomes an industry standard. Numalink could have been what infiniband is now. Infinitereality could have been what geforce is now. CXFS could have been what lustre is. XIO could be PCIe. SGI wanted to control it though. They tried to keep it all under the tent.
Parent
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I'm sure that when I'm a pensioner, I'll be the only one in the old folk home that has a mantle piece ornament that can play BZ flag!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't knock X too much - X was designed for a different audience than other windowing systems - specifically, it was designed for the model where an expensive server sits in one location and lots of cheap terminals lie around and connect to that server. It is actually a good design for what it was intended for. The problem is, almost nobody uses setups like that these days (though it's coming back... see OnLive), and it also lacked a number of "essential" features like security since the devs made th
Re: (Score:2)
I once had (sigh) an IR2 in my office for 6 months. I don't think I slept at home the entire time.
The nightmares of switching between streams were that bad huh?
Not An April Fool's Joke (Score:4, Informative)
Head hurts parsing this sentence... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
My head hurts trying to parse that sentence. Is there some grammatical rule that I don't fully understand or was that just a mistake in the summary?
I kind of understand it to mean -
"There was a time when there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
Though I could be wrong.
Re:Head hurts parsing this sentence... (Score:5, Informative)
You have parsed the sentance correctly. The construction is an idiomatic one, typically used by older folks looking back on how times have changed or younger folks affecting a similar attitude.
Parent
Re:Head hurts parsing this sentence... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
My head hurts trying to parse that sentence. Is there some grammatical rule that I don't fully understand or was that just a mistake in the summary?
Building target "quote"...
0 errors, 0 warnings
Build complete.
The sentence is old-fashioned, but lexically correct. In plainer English it basically means "There was a time when an SGI workstation was really cool and there was little else that was cooler".
Parent
could I ask (Score:3, Informative)
How old are you, where did you learn to speak English, and is it your native language?
Serious questions - I found the sentence mostly unexceptional (I'd probably have left out "that"), and I'm curious about the difficulty you had in parsing it.
The Natural Rise & Fall of Empires (Score:4, Insightful)
Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation.
Time was that there was little cooler than your company having its own Cray [wikipedia.org] machine.
... Wait, I'm sorry, what was the point of this exercise again? To wax nostalgic about the inevitable fall of empires?
Time was that there was little cooler than having the latest Sega game system [wikipedia.org] in your home.
Time was that there was little cooler than to puts around on a BSA motorcycle [wikipedia.org] in front of your friends.
Time was that there was little cooler than to be a citizen of Rome
Re:The Natural Rise & Fall of Empires (Score:4, Interesting)
The question is why do empires fall? Usually because they run out of lands to conquer. Or they lose their strategic advantage in technology (transportation, resources).
SGI was cool at the time, but their executive had a fatal flaw - they believed that the marketplace would always be willing to pay premium prices simply for the cool silver SGI badge on the monitor and desktop unit. Back then, anything that connected to a UNIX system would have a UNIX markup price; a UNIX RS232 or monitor cable would cost two or three times as much as a regular PC cable. Just to make sure no-one attempted to use a regular PC cable, an additional pair of pins would be used simply as a loop-back. Other vendors charged site licences by the maximum number of user accounts, the amount of memory, or the number of CPU's in the system.
Even though their engineers could see that PC's were catching up to workstation standards of CPU performance, SGI's executive board refused to develop for the PC platform, as they feared that they would have one half of the company attempting to undercut the profit margins of the other half.
By 1995, Microsoft had brought out Windows NT and other 3D vendors were providing professional graphics accelerator boards supporting texture mapping, SGI's engineers had left to form Nvidia. Then SGI sold all their graphics patents to Microsoft. SGI also bought out part of Cray in an effort to remain in the high-end visualisation market, but as PC clusters keep creeping upwards in performance that didn't work.
If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
Parent
They may be spending $25mil ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was younger, I could have only dreamed of having one of these venerable Unix systems. But now that they're finally cheap and I can afford them, Linux now makes them seem very outdated and proprietary in nature. Kind of a sad thing to see old dreams die, but in this case I think it's also a step forward.
It's always seemed like such a shame to see old well-designed machines built around Unix (rather than just generic PC's) become a thing of the past, though. Good quality hardware and a machine that looked and ran like it meant business, with fast disks and lots of RAM...
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Sun not so much, rumors are that IBM may buy them... HP is only alive b/c people are still using HP/UX and Tru64 for things.
IBM learned long ago the money is in selling support contracts. None of the other vendors ever seemed to really grasp that idea.
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IBM learned long ago the money is in selling support contracts. None of the other vendors ever seemed to really grasp that idea.
Actually, it's a lesson that HP has learned also (witness their growing services arm).
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oh no, HP is not alive because of their crappy Unixes, imaging and printing and networkig is practically carrying the company. In fact, the turd that is HP's Itanic er Itanium2 processor helped bring down sgi and
Re:Surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
HP? They're not alive because of people using HP-UX, they're alive because HP-UX is a trivial part of their business. They make laptops and printers, and that (especially the printers) is why they're alive.
Parent
The decay of workstations. (Score:3, Insightful)
Workstations died because all the PC hardware and software got better, and by leaps and bounds.
I think it started with the discovery that people could buy server motherboards and put them into desktops. Workstations were always about multiple processors and big bandwidth, and you could get there with a PC by buying a server motherboard. AMD + Intel's Mhz war just rocketed x86 way past where the likes of MIPS and Alpha could go through sheer brute force.
Even in the late 1990s, I had a dual Pentium II that wa
Re:The decay of workstations. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
What is the point of SPARC these days. (Score:3, Interesting)
You are so right.
Like, right now, I have to ask myself, what exactly does a SPARC or even POWER do that an AMD64 cannot? I just don't know now, and the differences used to be much more clear cut.
IT used to be floating point and registers that set the workstation cpu apart and both of those advantages are gone. Both AMD and Intel have made a lot of strides in floating point and then AMD64 added a lot of registers.
x86 assembly went from torture to kinda fun. I don't lust after a POWER chip the way I used t
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Generally correct, although a few things that I would argue.
#1: IBM and HP are both companies that do something other than Unix. SGI quit selling MIPS gear and had announced the end of the road for Irix a while back. That means that Sun is the only pure Unix company left standing--and the idiotic BoD is trying to get bought by anyone willing to fatten their wallets.
Interestingly, Apple's OS X and Sun's (Open)Solaris are the only Unixes that are (a) available on commodity hardware, and (b) actively being dev
$25M seems like a lot (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember when Everex and Kodak (and Dell too?) all got out of the Unix/SVR4 business. Kodak got out by selling to Sun. I seem to recall that Everex sold off their Unix operation for a paltry $100K.
I really wonder why Rackable is even bothering? Do they think the companies using SGI iron today will keep buying more stuff an SGI label on the front?
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Kodak bought ISC [wikipedia.org] in 1988.
it was the logo wot killed it (Score:4, Insightful)
It was obviously going to be all downhill for SGI when they replaced their cool cube logo with the useless text logo....
It's real (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:It's real (Score:4, Interesting)
SGI bought out part of Cray, the supercomputing/interconnect part. Sun bought out the other part of Cray, the storage systems part. Even if a company is in debt and has no sales, the patent portfolio is worth something even if it is for counter-litigation purposes.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
SGI bought out part of Cray, the supercomputing/interconnect part. Sun bought out the other part of Cray, the storage systems part. Even if a company is in debt and has no sales, the patent portfolio is worth something even if it is for counter-litigation purposes.
No, Sun bought the interconnect (it was eventually sold as the E10k series and made a ton of money outside the supercomputing space). SGI bought the nameplate, the legacy systems (you could buy a Cray T3E or SV1 from SGI and it would come with a Sun workstation to boot it up), and entry into a shrinking market. SGI never made any money on their purchase and ended up selling it for a loss. This kind of brain dead management is why SGI is in the trouble it is in.
SGI's storage systems came from its StorageTek
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O2 (Score:2, Informative)
My O2 is running OpenBSD, now. Too bad I can't get the latest versions of IRIX. It was pretty impressive what that little O2 could do.
My Octane does a pretty good job of holding the carpet down.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My Octane does a pretty good job of holding the carpet down.
Stupid uppity carpets
Old friends (Score:4, Interesting)
It almost broke my heart when during the remodeling I finally decided to put my old Sun workstation out to pasture - literally, into the backyard, to be picked up by trash folks later. It looked at me with that big monitor, "is that what you do to your elders?". A few years back it was my first Pentium, all SCSIed up and nowhere to go. Then it was my first 386, with extra drives hanging on ribbons out of a half-opened case. Before that it was my XT, along with its sharp yellow Casper monitor. I couldn't bear even to look at it. We spent so much time together. The only thing that remains from those days is my VT220 terminal which I used to log in to work through a modem to work remotely.
I never owned an SGI machine, but I knew people who worked there. SGI was in my back yard, so to speak. We were all so proud or "our" companies and "our" valley. There was no cooler place to live on the planet.
I also remember when Computer Literacy Bookstore closed down. I remember looking into the empty space at North First St. I remember when Kim Vestal's "Get your buns out of bed!" did not ring out in the morning.
Our friends leave us every day. Every time the world gets a little grayer. When it's all colorless, it may be time for us to go.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wouldn't surprise me if it were true. (Score:5, Informative)
BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song. These machines are still workhorses for 3D rendering, audio and video production.
These machines suck down the power like motherfuckers by today's standards. You can get more power in a refurb laptop. Mine allegedly costs around $1200 that way and has a Quadro 2700M 512MB with absolutely absurd memory bandwidth... the machine itself has T9400, 2GB exp. to 4GB, 250GB 7200RPM, DVD+/-R/W w/LS, 1680x1050 17", VGA+HDMI, 24bit/96khz audio, super pissed off ricoh SD/etc reader... How much will you pay for electricity in the summer months? I can run my system on one of those harbor freight solar panel setups and a $20 inverter (Thanks for the heads up Lumpy.)
Please, people, I know the love of antique hackery but let those systems die. They aren't going to save you anything in the long run. Speaking as someone who has owned SGI machines, VME suns, an Alphastation, and whole herds of Apollo DN-series and IBM RT-series machines, let them go on to that great goodnight at the recycler. As it is I still have an Indy R4400SC with a marginal power supply (or something) and a camera cluttering up my storage area. Even that thing draws more than my laptop. Food for thought.
Parent
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BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song.
'Killer' is debatable. The fuel is the entry level one you'd want to be buying, and even then you'd be stupid to put any money down for one. I was tempted to buy one a year or two ago, however the reality is that you'll get a useless machine, with crap OS, a limited supply of (dubious quality) software, all contained in a pretty case. I'd imagine it'd take you at least 6 months just to get firefox compiled and running on it (and that's after you take a 6 month sabbatical from your job just to re-install the