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Phoronix: HP Enterprise Buys Out SGI
HP Enterprise has announced it's acquiring SGI, formerly known as Silicon Graphics...
HP Enterprise has announced it's acquiring SGI, formerly known as Silicon Graphics...
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WHOA !! Didn't see that one coming. VERY...very interesting ! Particularly since Silicon Graphics over the last decade and a half left the graphics world and Hollywood and got into high end servers and supercomputers. Their NUMA tech is supposedly outstanding. Couple this and HP's upcoming "The Machine" architecture running an enhanced form of Linux and some interesting thing could come about from this.
Silicon Graphics has quite the history. Most of Hollywood's special effects in the 90's and even early 2000's were made on Silicon Graphics's machines which ran a version of Unix known as IRIX. The XFS file system was their creation and ported over to Linux after the demise of IRIX. They now work very closely with Red Hat and Suse. Plus, for all you Radeon fans, a group of ex Silicon Graphics engineers formed a company in the late 90's known as ArtX. Nintendo....after having worked with Silicon Graphics in the production of the Nintendo 64 game system ( which was actually a stripped down Silicon Graphics workstation ) approached the engineers at ArtX who had previously worked on the N64 about using their graphics tech in the upcoming Nintendo Gamecube. That was a smashing success and caught the eye of the formerly named graphics card maker ATI. And of course....in due time....ATI was bought by AMD. And ever since.....Nintendo has used Silicon Graphics/ArtX/ATI/AMD tech. And now....by extension....so does Microsoft (Xbone) and Sony (PS4).
Interesting times. -
Meh, HP has been nothing but a hollow shell for years now, composed primarily of marketing and sales types. All the engineering has been outsourced to India, along with the tech support. The only "innovation" you'll find at HP is what they've acquired through an endless stream of corporate mergers. They killed the Alpha and PA-RISC in favor of Itanium... we all know how well that turned out. I'm pretty sure the only reason HP broke their enterprise division out into "HPE" is for the purpose of soliciting a buyer. RIP Hewlett-Packard.Comment
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SGI hasn't been SGI for a decade. SGI is really Rackable!!!Comment
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Yeah, there's been much rejoicing at work, after our last client who insisted on using Itanium/HP-UX decided to switch to an x86-64/Linux platform. I think a few people will be looking to party once the migration is complete, and the last of the horrible HP-UX support machines finally gets turned off.Originally posted by torsionbar28 View PostComment
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Could you elaborate a bit more on why HP-UX is "horrible"?Originally posted by Delgarde View Post
HP consumer stuff is in my blacklist for a long list of very good reasons, their servers are ok like any other oem's, but I never had a chance to taste their very-high-end things with their own OS.Comment
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Understand, it's not necessarily a complaint over the merits of the HP-UX kernel... most of us aren't really in a position to judge that. Performance is hopeless, but we're not exactly running top-spec hardware... it's a platform for compiling and release-testing software, not a production system.Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
But the userspace is horrible... not just compared to GNU command-line tools on Linux, but also to traditional-UNIX rivals like AIX or Solaris. Their Java implementation was crap... we had a variety of performance problems that we had to address to support HP, things which had never shown up as factors anywhere else. Basically, it's all the little things that add up to make for very annoyed developers and testers every time they had to use it.Comment
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SGI has some relevant IP in rendering and the use of NUMA. The revenue has been declining for some years and this was clearly an exit strategy.
You guys didn't like Superdome? The datacenter guys hated it as much as the vendor management team did when it came to negotiating support renewals. Just too expensive on a MIPS per sq ft and MIPS per watt basis.
HPE still makes good common 2 socket servers (DL380 series). Some companies think they are identical to Lenovo and Dell 2 socket models, but I can tell you with no arguments, Dell 720 series is crap. Built to a price point to win corporate bids over HP and it runs like it too. But I digress.
We used to run some SGI equipment years ago, which we swapped out for NeXT gear, which got replaced with Apple Mac until the division was terminated.
While they have fallen into near forgotten status around the world, they did establish new graphics technologies until the common GPU vendors came along.Comment
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We're in the same boat, and came to the same conclusions. The userspace is awful. And we're stuck using HP's JDK to run our web apps, since HP is the only one who's released a JDK for HP-UX.Originally posted by Delgarde View Post
We're also doing HP-VM, so our big Itanium machines are all hypervisors running a bunch of HP-UX virtual machines, and we've had in the past 5 years, more than a few instances where the hypervisor OS crashed. The whole box went down hard and rebooted! This has happened multiple times, we've gone round after round for months with HP "Support" and it's been basically a guessing game "uhhh install this random patch and see if it's stable for a while". FYI I'm HP-UX certified in 11i v2 and 11i v3, been working with it since the 1990's so I'm not a n00b. It's just a poor quality product IMO. 11iv1 and even 11iv2 were solid, but 11iv3 has been nothing but problems for us since we first deployed it in 2008. We're in the process of migrating the whole mess to RHEL and JBoss - I'll be popping a bottle of champagne once we've completed that move!
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