Rackable takes SGI name after purchase
Now that Rackable's purchase of bankruptcy-laden Silicon Graphics Inc. has cleared the courts, Rackable is swapping its own name for the Silicon Valley veteran's.
Rackable Systems, a data center hardware specialist, is adopting SGI as its new name, after completing its acquisition of Silicon Graphics Inc.
The company announced the move Monday. Its $42.5 million purchase of the supercomputing company was granted court approval on April 30 and closed on Friday.
For the deal, Rackable created a subsidiary called Silicon Graphics International. That subsidiary then acquired the assets and liabilities of Silicon Graphics Inc. Rackable will now be known as "a Silicon Graphics International entity," and Silicon Graphics International will be branded as SGI.
The new SGI's portfolio will include high-performance products for medium- and large-scale data centers and high-performance computing. The board of the company is composed of senior executives from both Rackable and the former Silicon Graphics Inc., with Rackable CEO Mark Barrenechea remaining the company's chief executive.
In a blog post Monday, Barrenechea wrote that the Rackable name will live on as the brand for SGI's x86 cluster compute products. "Rackable will join our other industry-recognized brands--such as ICE Cube, Altix, InfiniteStorage, CloudRack, MicroSlice, Origin, and VUE--to comprise the new SGI," he wrote.
Fremont, Calif.-based Rackable was started in 1999, but Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Silicon Graphics Inc. goes back to 1981, when it was founded by a group of Stanford University alumni. Silicon Graphics Inc., which has major contracts with clients such as the U.S. Department of Defense, went into Chapter 11 administration at the start of April and was immediately snapped up by Rackable.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.