News comes from SGI about the launch of their new Channel Network Partner program, a global program for ‘a limited set of specialized partners’. The program benefits are fairly standard tools for resellers:

To support the new program, the company announced the SGI Channel Network Portal, a single point of web access to a comprehensive set of value-add sales and marketing tools for program partners, including a quote configurator, promotions, demand generation, training modules and opportunity registration.

What’s more interesting is the hint that SGI will be moving to making custom solutions available only through selected partners (presumably with some special value adding secret sauce):

SGI partners serve customers across vertical segments, including government, energy, manufacturing, Internet and cloud, financial services, digital media, and research and education. The SGI Channel Network Program offers increased support to address these high-value markets and meet the ever-growing customer requirements for HPC and data center solutions. SGI partners have access to the entire portfolio of SGI products, including new channel-oriented solutions for which partners will be the primary route to market.

Emphasis in the last sentence is mine. What new HPC toys can we expect to see from this new route to market?

The full press release from SGI can be found here, and the new SGI Channel Network portal can be found here.

Infostor has an interesting article on effects studios’ gradual migration away from direct attach storage (DAS) to new networked storage solutions. If you’re not that up on the difference between DAS, NAS, and SAN, this is an excellent introduction with some great explanatory diagrams.

When it comes to the storage infrastructure underpinning your digital content operations, you have three choices: direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), or storage area networks (SANs). And in studio environments, the trend is clearly away from DAS toward networked storage architectures such as NAS or SAN.

You can read the full article here.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 17 — As part of a multi-year collaboration, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (Nasdaq: SGIC) today announced it will provide the high-productivity solutions needed to outfit a new world-class cancer research facility in the United Kingdom.

Silicon Graphics has been selected to equip, over the next five or more years, an initiative in integrated network biology at London’s renowned The Institute of Cancer Research. Expected to open in spring 2009, the initiative in integrated network biology at The Institute will arm a team of cancer research pioneers with advanced compute, storage and visualization solutions built, implemented and optimized by Silicon Graphics.

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Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) today announced that as part of its commitment to address the demand for powerful collaborative visualization, Visual Area Networking (VAN) is now available with high performance support for Silicon Graphics(R) Onyx4(TM) UltimateVision(TM) systems using OpenGL Vizserver(TM) 3.3.
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SGI have announced the launch of hpctraining.com, which they bill as the “industry’s first one-stop-shop website for advanced HPC training”. With the range of courses and training SGI are offering, they could well be on to something.

Hpctraining.com provides coursework in the following areas:

• System Administration
• Network Administration
• Cluster Administration
• Storage Administration
• Visualization
• Applications/Software Development

One of the key things from my point of view is that the courses aren’t just on-site ones – there are also an increasing number of e-learning courses. For people wanting to break into HPC there are two main barriers – not being able to play with HPC-class kit, and not having the time to learn up about it. Computer based courses and simulators are the way to go for this.

hpctraining.com isn’t an SGI only effort, though. The partner list includes:

• Adaptive Computing
• Atempo
• CAPS
• Intel
• LSI
• Novell
• Octality
• Oracle University
• Panasas
• Platform Computing
• Red Hat
• SGI
• Spectralogic

There’s a lot on offer here and I think it’s a great initiative for existing or budding HPC people. I’m also pleased to see SGI are still offering IRIX courses.