Rackable takes SGI name along with company

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 13 May 2009 01:26

IT Industry - Strategy

Data center vendor Rackable Systems, completing its acquisition of Silicon Graphics, Inc., announced that it was adopting SGI as the company name and brand.

Rackable had formed a subsidiary named Silicon Graphics International, and it's that subsidiary that acquired Silicon Graphics.

The deal was approved on April 30 and cost Rackable US$42.5 million in cash.

Silicon Graphics, founded in 1981, was best known for its dedicated graphics workstations, as well as high-performance servers. But as general-purpose personal computers became more capable of high-end graphics processing, the company's core business fell off, and it entered bankruptcy (for the second time) at the beginning of April.

Rackable, a vendor of servers and storage for data centers, plans to leverage Silicon Graphics' reputation in servers to create "an expanded portfolio of cutting-edge, innovative and high performance products for medium and large-scale data centers and HPC," according to the announcement.

The company will be branded as SGI, with Rackable Systems remaining as the name of a product line.