[Beowulf] Rackable / SGI

[Ian Dillon]

Likewise Joe, watching the demise of SGI has been incredibly hard to fathom.
This was a great company with tons of energy/potential and did right by
their employees back in the day.  I think this is why so many of us feel for
the company and its current employee base. 



-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On
Behalf Of Joe Landman
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 5:57 AM
To: Kilian CAVALOTTI
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Rackable / SGI

Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote:
> On Wednesday 01 April 2009 13:58:22 John Hearns wrote:
>>
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/april/rackable
>> .html
>>
>> Not an April Fools.
> 
> Whoa. That, and IBM eating Sun, the market is really shrinking...

Read the note from SGI.  This was done as a bankruptcy filing this 
morning, and not all liabilities are going over.  That is, it is an 
asset purchase.  Creditors may still object, and force this to be a 
chapter 7 filing (sell the thing bit by bit).  I had been wondering if 
they had made their $5M debt service payment on friday, and whether or 
not their creditors believed them to be in default.  The speed of this 
and its construction, have a feel of a "rush" job ... last minute to 
stave off a complete shuttering and sale.

I sympathize with my friends and former co-workers at the company ... 
this is a whopper of a layoff ... with likely no severance (SGI was ~3x 
Rackable's size w.r.t. people, and I would bet only a small fraction 
will follow the asset sale, if Rackable makes them an offer).

Sad day.

As for the market shrinking, well ... this does happen.  We (Scalable) 
are happy to help customers out (service/support on existing systems, 
new clusters/storage), as is Don's company (Penguin), as are other 
companies here.  Some of us are doing well and growing.

Joe


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
        http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax  : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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