Continuing its drive into the Linux arena, Silicon Graphics, Inc. this week released its new Intel processor-based SGI 1400L server.
The server, preloaded with the SGI Linux Environment, offers customers a platform for database serving, file sharing, technical computing and Web serving.
The SGI Linux Environment, a version of Red Hat Linux 6.0, improves network performance and prevents denial-of-service attacks, says Hank Shiffman, strategic technologist at SGI in Mountain View, Calif. The server, which uses up to four Intel processors, is geared toward workgroups.
The 1400L is designed for collaboration and messaging, network video streaming, proxy serving, security serving and scientific analysis. It comes with one to four 500MHz Pentium III Xeon processors, 512K, 1M or 2M bytes of secondary cache, up to 4G bytes of memory, seven PCI slots, six Ultra2 SCSI hot-swappable drive bays and redundant power supplies.
The server also comes with Samba, an open-source product that adds native Windows NT files and print services to Linux, and is available in rack-mount or deskside configurations. A base configuration that includes one processor, a 512K-byte cache, 256M bytes of memory and a 9G-byte disk starts at $7,935.
SGI also plans to announce in the near future a two-way system in the SGI 1000 server family that will be geared toward ISPs.
SGI hinted about its Linux strategy at Spring Comdex this year, when CEO Richard Belluzzo said the company believes in the open-source model. Recently, SGI offered the key XFS piece of its Irix operating system to the open-source community. The XFS piece can enhance a Linux-based system's ability to recover after a crash and to handle very large files.
The release of the SGI 1400L shows the company's commitment to providing Linux solutions, and SGI intends to add more value to the Linux system by providing it with more support, Shiffman says.
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