Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

SGI: PROTECT OR PERISH
By Winston Raj

With 16 years in sales and marketing, Bob Bishop knows all about protecting one's own turf. That's why the chairman and CEO of Silicon Graphics Inc is bent on making inroads into the crowded high-end storage market.

SGI's storage candidate -- the SGI SAN Server -- serves the needs of his high-end computing customers, said Bishop. It has the "scalability of a traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) with the connectivity of a Networked Attached Storage (NAS)," he added.

SGI's entry into the multi-terabyte storage market will pit it against entrenched storage behemoths EMC Corp, Storage Technologies Corp and IBM Corp, who currently dominate the sector. But is it a battle worth fighting?

Yes, according to Bishop. In an e-mail interview last week, Bishop argued that SGI has "been providing storage systems to customers for some years now, and due to computational needs of our customers and the large data sets that they work with, it has become apparent that we would have to provide a storage solution."

However, some observers noted that SGI is working to ensure that SGI devices are attached to networks of SGI servers and storage. The move comes as Intel Corp gains momentum in SGI's own home turf: high-performance visualization.

In July, US-based cinema heavyweight Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), a division of Lucas Digital Ltd LLC, announced that it will use Intel technology in future animation projects. ILM's graphics work on the forthcoming movies Star Wars: Episode III, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines, is powered by Intel's Pentium 4 processor -- forgoing SGI's own proprietary architecture.

Bishop however defended his company as the "the only company capable of meeting the challenging demands" of high-end creative and technical computing users. "SGI already has a well-established reputation for high-performance computing and advanced visualization solutions at the highest level," he added, "and we feel that our solutions for managing that complex data will also be unparalleled in the industry."

Asian worry

In Asia, SGI's own high-performance efforts are being seriously challenged by locally-bred companies.

Recently, China's Legend Group Ltd unveiled its first supercomputer, a machine that ranks as one of the top 25 most powerful computers in the world, according to specifications issued by the company.

The machine, called Legend Deepcomp 1800, was developed by a team of 60 engineers at the Beijing-based company, which is better known as one of China's leading manufacturers of desktop and notebook computer systems.

The computer will be installed this month at the Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences at the China Academy of Sciences in Beijing where it will be used for tasks including fluid dynamics computation, earthquake information control, oil reservoir simulation, climatic modeling and DNA computation, said Legend.

This tests SGI's foothold in the lucrative supercomputing market in China, and in Asia. Currently, the Beijing Planetarium, Chinese Academy of Agriculture Science, Computer Integrated Manufacturing Research Institute, Nanjing University's Department of Astronomy and the Biological Information Center of Shanghai Institute of Life Sciences and Biotechnology have purchased SGI servers. Outside of China, SGI's servers are being used in Japan's National Research Institute of Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, and more recently the company has entered a US$5.6 million (HK$43.7 million) contract to build a supercomputing facility in Malaysia for the Multimedia Development Corp (MDC) -- the government-led organization overseeing Malaysia's development of the much-publicized Multimedia Super Corridor.

"Silicon Graphics remains highly committed to our customers in Greater China," said Bishop, who admitted that his company is now looking to improve its reach in the region. "We have to enforce market analysis and leverage our partnerships agreements," he added.

At the same time, Bishop is looking to build a similar facility that closely follows MDC's. "SGI is also building a super-lab for visual and virtual computing in China," he added. "Due to be completed in the second half of 2002, our clients in China can then enjoy working in the same high-performance virtual environments as their overseas counterparts."

It will also allow SGI to stave off local competitors -- at least for the time being.