Rackable Systems IPO

ITトレンド

http://www.rackable.com/
http://www.rackable.com/Rackable_Scale%20Out%20Server.pdf
Business Week 1/24/05 At Last, a Hardware IPO, Rackable makes innovative servers that power some of Google searches. Now, it may break one of tech's longest droughts
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2005/tc20050124_1722_tc024.htm

Why could Rackable buck the trend? It has been an innovator in helping some of the fastest-growing Internet companies run their server farms more efficiently. Founded in 1999, it got its start building servers for Google (GOOG ), then just a startup itself. Today, say sources, its customers include Yahoo! (YHOO ) and another major search portal.

Rackable does have impressive financials, say the sources. While Egenera lost $37 million on sales of $41 million in 2003, its last full year for which data is publicly available, sources say Rackable had sales of more than $100 million in 2004 and is growing rapidly. Also, the sources add, it has been profitable for years.

What's Rackable's secret? Rather than sell pricey stand-alone servers, it cobbles together plain-vanilla servers using commodity parts, as prescribed by each customer. Then, it stuffs these "blade servers," which look more like circuit cards than a regular PC, into special racks that make them much cheaper to run because they take up less room, so client companies pay less for data-center real estate.
Also, because of an unusual configuration that disperses the heat, Rackable's design solves the overheating issues many techies would expect to encounter when so many machines are stuffed into such small spaces. Another advantage: The configuration reduces the cables required to link all the systems, making them easily accessible. With fewer cables to deal with, the chance that someone will pull the wrong one while doing maintenance or fixing a problem is reduced.

What's more, the racks are tuned to use network management software that lets the servers share processing jobs. That way, if one server fails, the others pick up its workload.