Businessweek

Silicon Graphics International Corp. develops, markets, and sells a line of computing servers and data storage, as well as differentiating software. The company sells data center infrastructure products purpose-built for large-scale data center deployments. It provides global customer support and professional services related to its products. The company also develops features for the Linux operating system. Its products and services are used by the scientific, technical, and business communities to solve data-intensive computing, data storage, and management problems. The company serves vertical industry markets, including defense and strategic systems, weather and climate, physical sciences, life sciences, energy (including oil and gas), aerospace and automotive, media and entertainment, semiconductor design, manufacturing, financial services, data centers, business intelligence, and data analytics. Applications for its systems within these vertical markets include simulating global climate changes, accelerating engineering of new automotive designs, supporting homeland security initiatives, providing real-time fraud detection, streaming media from Internet-video to film, and gaining business intelligence through data-mining. Segments The company operates through two segments, Products and Services. Products This segment engages in the sale of the company’s line of scale out and scale up servers, and data storage solutions, as well as sale of various software products or software applications for server and storage management. Its servers and data storage solutions are based on Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors, NVIDIA graphics processors, and the Linux or Microsoft Windows operating systems. The company’s servers include products sold under the SGI UV Supercomputer, SGI ICE Clusters, CloudRack, and Rackable rack mount server brand names. The company’s data storage solutions are sold under the SGI InfiniteStorage, SGI Modular InfiniteStorage, ArcFiniti, and COPAN brand names. The company also sells third-party products if these products are needed to complete customer installations as part of its service offerings. Services This segment provides two types of services, including customer support services and professional services. The company’s customer support organization provides ongoing maintenance and technical support for its products and some third-party products, as well as contracted maintenance services, hardware deployment services (install and de-install), time and materials-based services, and spare parts. Its professional services organization provides technology consulting, project management, managed services, and customer education, all of which help its customers realize the value of their information technology investments. Solutions The company provides a line of solutions designed to address the demands of market verticals, such as government intelligence, life sciences, media and entertainment, virtual product development in the manufacturing industry, cloud and Web computing, and financial services. These solutions allow its customers to run data-intensive applications and store their data. Its core solutions are computing and storage solutions based on Intel and AMD processors, NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), and the Linux operating system. The company’s storage product lines integrate disk systems, ranging from entry-level disk arrays to complex storage systems. The company groups its solutions into four categories, including big data, data storage, scale-out compute, and scale-up compute. Big Data Solutions SGI Hadoop Solutions: The company has implemented the primary single Hadoop clusters and the primary Hadoop installation in the industry. The solutions start with a software stack, including its proprietary SGI Management Center, cluster management software that offers ease of management of various server nodes, complete monitoring of all primary system aspects, and fine-grained power management. Underneath the SGI Management Center are open components, including the Linux operating system and the Apache-based Hadoop distribution. SGI Hadoop sol