GOVERNMENT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- SGI (NYSE: SGI) today announced that Dutch public broadcaster NOS (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting), in Hilversum, The Netherlands, was one of the first companies to purchase the recently introduced UNIX® OS-based SGI(TM) Origin® 300 compact, modular supercomputer. NOS, which hosts one of the country's largest Internet sites (www.omroep.nl) using 20 SGI(TM) Origin® 200 IRIX® OS?based high-performance servers, will use the SGI Origin 300 system as a portal server to further expand its Web environment and to carry its Electronic Program Guide. NOS Web sites provide access to numerous NOS television programs aired throughout the day as well as five radio stations, also available in streaming format. In addition to more than 30 Web sites with hundreds of subsites (all accessible via the Omroep site), NOS has the overall responsibility of programming five on-air public radio and three on-air public television channels with programs provided by Dutch media organizations. Currently at NOS, SGI Origin 200 servers consistently and reliably handle more than 80,000 hits per minute -- all the way up to NOS's record of 38 million hits in one day on September 12, 2001. A single SGI Origin 200 server handled most of that record-setting day's work: 18.5 million hits. The SGI Origin 200 server used to distribute the streaming media files handles more than 600,000 files per month. NOS, which uses an SGI(TM) storage area network (SAN), also operates ten SGI(TM) 1200 servers for its Internet department encoder environment, using the servers to capture the audio and video signals and transform the programming into streaming media files. The addition of one SGI Origin 300 system to NOS's SGI Origin 200 server environment is expected to double the performance of its Internet media streaming capabilities. ``At NOS, we have been using SGI hardware for more than six years. Our very first Web site ran on SGI,'' said Eric van Loon, Internet department coordinator at NOS. ``We chose SGI Origin 200 because SGI provides the best performance. We have tested other hardware, but the SGI server is the only one capable of giving us more than 80,000 hits per minute. Now, with the introduction of SGI Origin 300, we anticipate getting twice the performance in a form factor that is half the size.'' The SGI Origin 300 server is designed for technical midrange and media applications. The SGI Origin 300 server extends the SGI(TM) NUMAflex(TM) modular computing approach to space-saving, lower cost configurations that can be specifically tailored for high-performance computing, data archiving or media streaming applications. ``SGI is pleased to be the platform of choice as NOS continues to spearhead the digital future of Dutch public broadcasting. The SGI Origin 300 server is able to pack tremendous performance into compact, rack-mounted systems and, in a small footprint, to meet the increasing price/performance and space demands of leading-edge media streaming applications,'' said Fabio Gallo, director of marketing, SGI EMEA. ``All SGI Origin family servers are based on the SGI NUMAflex concept, which set the standard in modular computing by allowing independent configuration and scalability of components without any central system bandwidth limitation.'' NOS has also purchased from SGI a 10TB near-line storage solution based on the StorageTek L700 tape library and Fibre Channel 9840 tape drives. NOS will integrate this Fibre Channel?based near-line solution with its existing SGI SAN. This addition will enable NOS to employ SGI(TM) Data Migration Facility (DMF) to drive its HSM demands, on top of the scalable SGI(TM) CXFS(TM) clustered filesystem. The near-line storage will be used to provide several news programs via the Internet and is expected to expand as the demand for these types of services increases. Implementation is planned for January 2002. For more information visit www.sgi or www.omroep.nl