STORAGE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE:SGI) today announced a major initiative aimed at establishing strong presence in the rapidly-growing market for storing, accessing and sharing large amounts of data and digital content. The initiative includes new marketing and branding programs, a suite of new products, and expanded services for application developers and distributors who wish to take advantage of the power and flexibility of SGI's suite of open, multiplatform storage products. "SGI has been a too well kept secret in storage. While the bulk of the industry is merely talking about complex things like Information Lifecycle Management and Distributed Clustered File Systems, SGI has been delivering this in some of the most diverse, demanding sites for years," said Steve Duplessie, Enterprise Storage Group. "This focus on storage as a key strategic portion of their business should increase the overall market awareness of their technology and provide a platform for greater numbers of customers to take advantage of their offerings." New Products and Capabilities Under a new product family brand -- SGI(R) InfiniteStorage -- SGI today announced a series of new hardware and software products designed to allow customers to improve their data management processes, or workflows. InfiniteStorage offers customers three significant capabilities unique to SGI: the ability to transparently share data across their organization by avoiding data copying and movement; the ability to scale data as the business and application grows; and the ability to manage the data lifecycle without limiting access. These capabilities enable faster and more widespread access to data and digital content, while lowering overall storage and maintenance costs with a single solution that scales to address customer needs. Conversely, conventional Storage Area Networks (SANs) hinder the process by requiring data files to be replicated when users on multiple operating systems need to access and/or modify data files. Among the new products and capabilities are: -- A new version (3.0) of SGI's CXFS(TM) shared file system, which includes support for a wide range of leading operating environments; enabling users and applications to share data concurrently over a storage area network without replicating files. CXFS now supports Linux(R) and IBM(R) AIX(R) in addition to current support for IRIX(R), Solaris(TM) and Windows(R) platforms. -- SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF) version 2.9 transparently supports multiple tiers of storage including online disk, near-line disk and tape. DMF 2.9 supports a wide variety of client operating systems and is hosted on either IRIX or Linux systems. -- New SGI(R) InfiniteStorage NAS 2000, SGI(R) InfiniteStorage SAN 2000, and SGI(R) InfiniteStorage SAN 3000 solutions, which deliver the full capabilities of InfiniteStorage technology, provides up to 112TB of NAS storage attached with unified file system access. "Traditional network data sharing methods have become inadequate as enterprise data set sizes continue to increase, making storage management and deployment among the largest pain points for IT to manage" added Steve Kenniston, Enterprise Storage Group. "By translating a depth of knowledge in high-end computing into its InfiniteStorage solutions, SGI offers a very comprehensive offering for mainstream applications." Customers increasing productivity with SGI storage technology include Total, the major French oil and gas company; Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center managing a petabyte of data for its Terascale Computing System; Tata Motors Ltd., India's only fully integrated automobile manufacturer; and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for its recent discoveries in mapping the universe. SGI recently announced that Tata has purchased several high-performance computing, visualization and storage solutions from SGI to improve the design, engineering and manufacture of its passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Also, a separate release today reported that NASA Goddard's recent implementation of CXFS-which enables any server to access data at direct connect speeds-has improved performance in production processing by a factor of four. These and other SGI storage customer press releases can be found at www.sgi.com/newsroom. New Developer Programs and Alliances The company is also launching a series of new alliances and new programs targeted at helping SGI developers bring powerful new storage solutions into the marketplace. These include increased porting and technical assistance for storage solutions on both the IRIX and Linux platforms. In a separate release today, SGI announced an OEM reseller agreement with AppIQ. SGI will OEM components of AppIQ's standards-based SAN management technology. SGI will also market AppIQ's complete enterprise solution suite to provide support for heterogeneous operating systems and storage environments. The alliance between SGI and AppIQ will help customers manage their SANs more effectively and efficiently. SGI also recently announced plans to integrate the SGI SAN Server(TM) family and CXFS with systems and software from Discreet. The resulting solution will enable film mastering and video production facilities to improve their productivity, manage multiple jobs simultaneously, share content between digital content creation seats on a variety of operating systems, and most importantly, optimize the time of their creative talent. Other key alliances include relationships with Hitachi Ltd. and LSI Logic Storage Systems. Hitachi and SGI collaborate to extend the multiplatform capabilities of CXFS. Hitachi also incorporates CXFS into its SAN solutions to provide data sharing. SGI re-markets LSI Logic's RAID array technology. The collaboration with LSI has resulted in powerful solutions for managing complex data in high-performance computing environments. SGI storage solutions have proven valuable where the growth of data is exceeding boundaries of conventional storage technology. Among the company's achievements in managing data management challenges are supporting a 70TB single file system and over a petabyte of data managed on a single site, delivering 12GBs of I/O to a single system and accomplishing a 10TB/hour record backup and 7.9TB/hour restore. Availability and Support SGI InfiniteStorage Solutions are available directly from SGI or through the SGI Solution Providers worldwide. Complementing InfiniteStorage are SGI Technology Solutions, that custom design, deliver and support storage solutions, and SGI Managed Services that provides comprehensive installation and configuration services to provide immediate return on storage investment. SGI's SAN Review board, comprised of the company's top storage experts, provides customers and partners an unparalleled depth of expertise in real world, high-performance SAN design and implementation.