SGI jumps into the server sandpit with Sun and IBM

SGI has extended its Origin server line with a product it boasts beats the latest offerings from HP, IBM and Sun on price.

The Origin 300 is targeted at four vertical markets manufacturing, life sciences, media and government departments - primarily defence - and is being touted on its relatively small size and price competitiveness.

Origin has a rack mount design which holds up to 32 processors, two or four 64bit MIPS processors a piece on each server module. Two 32 processor Origin 300 systems can be fitted on a single industry standard rack mount.

The company has priced a configuration of two processors with 512MB of memory at £18,000.

Crispin Keable, SGI's high power computing solutions manager said: "We recognise there are customers out there who don't want to scale to 100s of processors. To them it makes sense to opt for power price performance that doesn't need extra infrastructure."

One of the first customers of the Origin 300 is the department of physics and applied physics at Strathclyde University.

The university has invested £300,000 on a 16 processor system that will initially be used to study non-linear optics and atomic physics.

In a statement, Professor Gian-Luca Oppo, chair of computational physics, said: "SGI's Origin 300 was chosen for its performance and scalability. In fact, we were impressed particularly by the SGI 16-processor parallel machine being faster than 70 PC processors in a cluster configuration."

On the back of the Origin announcement, SGI has also launched an entry-level storage system to go with it.

The Total Performance 900 (TP900) is also targeted at customers with a tight budget, it supports eight 73GB SCSI drives for up to 584GB of storage. Two TP900 units can be combined on a single rack to provide 11TB of memory.