By William Fellows

SGI is rolling out another piece of strategy one today (Monday), its first Intel IA-32 servers with Linux and NT, while CEO Rick Belluzzo delivers strategy three to the market and shareholders on Thursday. SGI’s 1000 family is available initially as a four- way 500MHz Pentium III Xeon server 1400L (Linux) or 1400M (Microsoft). Pricing is initially set at around $14,500 as a two- way with 1Mb cache, 256Mb RAM, 9Gb disk and no operating system to compete with Compaq’s 5500 server (add $1,000 for the Microsoft NT ‘tax’ says SGI), although that may change by ship date. Dell’s 6300 is cheaper at under $13,500 (but less functional) while the HP LH4 and IBM 7000 M10 are more expensive.

The NT box is aimed at manufacturing, digital media, sciences and government markets. The Linux device for ISP and telcos, engineering and software developers and research and education markets.

The 1400 is essentially an NT play. It’s where the revenue opportunity is and expected to outsell the Linux configuration at least 80/20. SGI’s real Linux play won’t be available until year- end. That’s a one- or two-way rackmount unit for ISPs with Beowulf clustering and rendering functions. Early next year there will be an eight-way 1000 for data warehousing and analysis and scientific analysis.

SGI says it’s going to make sure it manages the channel and distribution better than it has done with its NT workstations. The new servers will be built to order, the same as the workstations, but SGI says it will make them much easier to configure. For one, they have none of the specialist SGI graphics chipsets to configure. It will also give the boxes to its Origin Unix server channel. It’s not looking for OEMs for the 1400 application servers but will make a big push for OEM business with the two-way rackmount.

Running Red Hat Linux 6.0 with its own SGI Linux Environment the company says the OS includes a Linux 2.2 kernel with SGI enhancements including improved Apache web serving with TCP/IP stack management, file sharing (kernel NFS demon) and security (strengthened ICMP denial of service patch).

SGI is the first to stand up and wave the Linux flag as well as contributing technology such as its XFS journaled file systems to the open source community, bits of which are likely to be picked up for inclusion in future distributions. SGI hopes to help Linux out of its ‘rogue’ pigeon hole with support and contributions for open source enterprise initiatives.

Jan Silverman, SGI’s new VP marketing for computer systems who has this bag is an Apollo veteran SGI recently lured away from Hewlett-Packard Co. He says he was disappointed at HP’s inability to move quickly into new markets and figures it handled the Apollo workstation acquisition of nearly ten years ago badly. However HP could have been competing with Sun now had it done the thing right with Apollo. Instead Sun was able to kill Apollo Unix. Silverman would love to see Linux be the red hot poker that eventually runs through Sun. he likes it that SGI simply can’t handle too many products at once, making focus inevitable.

In the meantime if Linux doesn’t cut the mustard – and its real opportunity will be on IA-64 says SGI – then SGI could always bring its Irix Unix over. Having already ruled that out it doesn’t want to be seen to be hedging its bets now, but says that is always a last card it could play. If Linux on IA-64 flies on Merced then there’s no need for Irix, it figures.

Belluzzo’s third strike at SGI strategy due Thursday is unlikely to contain too many surprises insiders figure.