Virtualization Track at Cloud Expo

A reconstituted SGI has resurrected its old entry-level enterprise-oriented Origin brand and slapped it on a Westmere-EP Xeon 5600-based SME-targeted workgroup blade system called the Origin 400 that comes with integrated SAN and networking.

The thing, which is made for standard business computing, is fitted out for everyone's favorite virtualization, and the usual web server, applications server, e-mail server, back-end database server chores. It supports Windows and Linux. SGI wants to send it through channels into verticals like regional healthcare, education, local government, retail, software development, call centers, community banking, accounting and legal.

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The widget scales to six dual-socket compute blades (or 72 cores per system max depending on whether they're six-core or four-core) and 14 shared 2.5-inch virtual SAS drives (4.2TB local capacity) with hardware RAID in a 6U rack-mount enclosure. It includes integrated gigabit Ethernet networking, point-and-click management and failover.

Power supplies, cooling fans, RAID controllers and networking modules can be made redundant and are hot-pluggable.

SGI is letting resellers price the thing. It claims HP, Sun and Dell solutions are "over-populated."

It says in "many comparisons" the machine reaches breakeven with rack-mount servers with only two of the blades populated

SGI, like everybody else, is moving its other systems to Intel's Westmere-EP chips too, including its Altix ICE HPC clusters, CloudRack and Rackable scale-out servers, InfiniteStorage servers and Octane III personal supercomputers.

The Xeon 5600 processor scales to 1,056 cores in a single rack with Rackable's back-to-back mounted, half-depth servers.