Press Release

SGI Positioned In Leading Analyst Firm's Magic Quadrant Report for Midrange and High-end NAS Solutions

Report Considers Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

ORLANDO, Fla. — Storage Networking World, Booth No. 700 (April 7, 2008)—SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) today announced it has been positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report for midrange and high-end network attached storage (NAS). SGI and 13 other vendors in the report, titled "Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End NAS Solutions, 1H08¹," were evaluated on their completeness of vision and their ability to execute.

"Storage administrators who have been focusing on managing their storage area networks (SANs) are facing new storage challenges, especially in consolidation of distributed file servers, the high-throughput requirement of rich media and HPC applications, and low-cost, easy-to-grow disk storage for ‘bulk' digital content," cites the report, which was authored by Gartner analysts Pushan Rinnen, Robert E. Passmore, and Roger W. Cox, and published March 5, 2008. "Among the various storage solutions available to tackle those challenges, midrange and high-end network-attached storage (NAS) products generally have proved to offer capacity and performance scalability and ease of use at reasonable prices."

"Our position in this NAS-focused Gartner Magic Quadrant report follows SGI's previous appearance in the ‘Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2H07'² which Gartner published on Jan. 12, 2008," said Raj Das, vice president of storage, SGI. "We consider our presence in Gartner's industry assessments to be an acknowledgement of SGI's growing momentum as a provider of storage and high-performance NAS solutions focused squarely on High-Performance Storage and High-Performance Business (HPB) users.

"Our efforts to develop new storage technologies have pushed scalability, file directory size, and performance to levels needed to support today's data-intensive scientific, high-performance business, and digital media applications," added Das. "These efforts have resulted in an increasing number of high-profile deployments and the introduction of truly differentiated platforms, such as SGI® InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 NAS with support for remote direct-memory access (NFS/RDMA)."

Unveiled in 2007, the SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 9000 NFS/RDMA NAS solution greatly simplifies shared storage and gives HPC and HPB organizations enterprise-style ease of deployment, automated asset discovery and day-to-day management — while maintaining the extreme levels of performance these organizations demand. Among the SGI innovations included in this new platform is the combination of NFS/RDMA over InfiniBand and an expanded cache architecture. This results in reduced CPU overhead and increased data throughput from disk to application, as well as the possibility of enabling more memory and disks on a single NAS solution.

SGI InfiniteStorage solutions are increasingly popular in environments struggling to manage and access ever-larger quantities of data — without making compromises to application performance. For instance, the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute (www.sci.utah.edu) last year installed a 115TB SGI InfiniteStorage virtualized data management solution based on SGI NAS technology to help faculty, students and research staff strategically access information essential to their projects—a growing challenge in an environment where researchers in multiple disciplines work with the same source data, often simultaneously.

"Our experience with SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS solutions convinces us that SGI continues to understand large data, including requirements for scalability, management, and expandability as driven by our users' data needs," said Dr. Greg Jones, associate director of the SCI Institute and recipient of the 2007 Medal for Science and Technology awarded by Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman.

For more information about SGI InfiniteStorage NAS solutions, visit www.sgi.com/products/storage/.

SGI | Innovation for Results™
SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a broad range of high-performance server, storage and visualization solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI helps customers solve significant challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate change, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at sgi.com.

SGI, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks of SGI in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

Editor's Note

¹ About the Magic Quadrant: The Gartner Magic Quadrants are copyrighted 2008 by Gartner, Inc., and are reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

² Gartner, Inc. "Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2H07" by Stanley Zaffos, Roger W. Cox and Pushan Rinnen, January 12, 2008.