ENGINEERING

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI), a leader in high-performance computing, complex data management and visualization products, solutions and services today announced SGI(TM) CXFS(TM) Version 2.0 -- the world's most scalable, journaled clustered file system -- with extended capabilities to support the Solaris(TM) operating system. SGI CXFS is a clustered solution that provides a single file system accessible on a heterogeneous storage area network (SAN) from multiple hosts, including IRIX(R), Linux(R), Windows NT(R), Windows(R) 2000 and now Solaris. With this new capability, SGI IRIX OS-based customers can seamlessly share data with Solaris OS-based systems in real time, thereby increasing productivity and reducing costs. Built on the high-performance SGI(TM) XFS(TM) filesystem and the next-generation SGI(TM) XVM volume manager, CXFS enables multiple computers direct access to a shared filesystem, which means all systems in a CXFS environment have access to the same file at the same time at local or near-local speeds. Creative and technical professionals rely on SGI for modular solutions to solve the largest, most complex data and content management challenges that require massive scalability and the highest throughput. Customers in markets such as media, sciences, energy, and government and defense have embraced SGI CXFS IRIX solutions for their performance-sensitive data-sharing needs, and with this announcement SGI extends its solutions to a broader set of customers. SGI CXFS Version 2.0 leverages the SGI modular data-management architecture and fulfills customers' needs in areas such as high-availability application clustering with SGI(TM) FailSafe(TM), virtual storage with SGI(TM) Data Migration Facility (DMF) and backup software from SGI partners. "SGI CXFS has allowed us to carry out multiple projects simultaneously using the same data on different systems, tremendously increasing our productivity while reducing nonproductive waiting time and system downtime," stated Arthur Toga, director of research at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. "With this announcement, SGI demonstrates its commitment to complex data management by extending CXFS capabilities/features with heterogeneous platform support," said Gabriel Broner, vice president of software and storage engineering, at SGI. "SGI solutions such as CXFS streamline data workflow and enable very fast SAN environments, thereby providing our customers with a performance advantage and an excellent return on investment." SGI CXFS provides no-compromise data sharing by combining unparalleled scalability and performance with SAN technology, enabling computer users to efficiently share data, which leads to faster time to insight and more powerful scientific and creative innovation. SANs provide direct, high-speed physical connections among multiple hosts and disk storage that gives CXFS data-sharing performance that is at least 10 times faster than traditional methods such as NFS(TM) or manually copying files using FTP. Implementing CXFS reduces costs by centralizing and consolidating storage, reducing data duplication, lowering administration costs, removing local area network bottlenecks and streamlining the application workflow. Single files as large as 9 million terabytes and filesystems as large as 18 million terabytes are supported, ensuring that CXFS users never hit the limit of file or filesystem size. CXFS features include: -- Industry-leading performance -- Journaling for reliability and fast recovery -- 64-bit scalability to support extremely large files and filesystems -- Real-time filesystems -- Dynamically allocated metadata space, ensuring that data integrity is preserved -- Built-in metadata server multihost failover As the foundation for support of CXFS clients, the SGI(TM) family of storage solutions offers storage consolidation and management, backup, and hierarchical storage management solutions. SGI storage solutions, which deliver the highest performance and data availability with multi-OS support for IRIX, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Solaris, include: -- SGI(TM) TP9100 -- a flexible RAID storage solution with an entry-level price that is available in rack or deskside configuration, enabling customers to scale to multiterabyte configurations -- SGI(TM) TP9400 -- a midrange storage solution with up to 7.3TB of storage capacity in a single rack and RAID support that offers true redundancy of all active components in the subsystem -- HDS 9960 -- an enterprise storage array with the most highly available, cost-effective high-end multiplatform disk array on the market, which allows for 24-hour instantaneous data access Global Services Organization A superior level of service and support is behind the entire SGI product line with highly trained personnel that operate in more than 50 countries and in all major cities worldwide. SGI Professional Services offers integrated solutions that enable customers to optimize their hardware investments. To ensure a fully functional high-performance data-sharing solution, SGI provides a suite of product-focused implementations, system management services and customized consulting. SGI(SM) Global Services solutions include: -- A team of experts experienced in the complexities of high-performance storage solutions -- Custom solutions for complex designs tailored to customers' environments -- Flexible integrated designs to provide customers a distinct competitive advantage SGI CXFS is supported on all SGI IRIX OS-based systems. Entry price for CXFS is $2,500 (U.S. list), and the solution is capable of scaling up to 64 systems, each with up to 512 processors. CXFS for Solaris will be available the first quarter of 2002. For more information visit www.sgi.com