SGI Introduces Origin 400 Integrated Workgroup Blade System

Helping remote offices and small- and medium-sized enterprises improve their storage facilities, SGI, a provider of HPC and data center solutions, has unveiled Origin 400, an integrated workgroup blade system.

Virtualization support is critical in SME workloads and Origin 400 was designed to cater to this market. The integrated virtualized SAN is the perfect match for software virtualization such as VMWare ESX 4.0, the company states. It makes full use of the new Intel (News - Alert) Xeon processor 5600 series to accelerate application performance and increase density and power efficiency with up to 72 cores per system.

Origin 400 provides various features such as virtualization capabilities that provide maximum flexibility and eliminate the need to overinvest in hardware. It is suitable for a large number of applications with its vast software certifications, including VMware, Linux, SAP, Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. It can function seamlessly as a web server, applications server, email server and backend database server as it works on a single platform.

“Origin 400 is a strong addition to our channel product portfolio and gives our partners an innovative, channel-focused product to help drive maximum value,' said Tony Carrozza, senior vice president of worldwide sales at SGI. 'Origin 400 establishes a new bar for performance, manageability and ease-of-use as small- and medium-sized enterprises struggle to keep pace with increasingly complex IT infrastructures.”

Origin 400 caters to various enterprise verticals, including regional healthcare, education, local government, retail, software development, call centers, and community banking, accounting and legal. It scales to six dual-socket compute blades and 14 2.5' SAS (News - Alert) hard drives within a 6U rackmount enclosure, the company states.

In March 2010, the company announced full and immediate support of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series (codenamed 'Westmere-EP') across its entire scale-out server lineup, including Altix ICE high performance computing (HPC) clusters, CloudRack and Rackable scale-out servers, SGI InfiniteStorage servers, the Octane III personal supercomputer and the newly announced Origin 400 workgroup blade solution. SGI's server solutions boast increased performance, core density and power efficiency.

 

Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard