SGI announced changes to its ICE Cube family of containerized data centers, adding new models that will be able to house standard server racks for the first time.

SGI, a provider of HPC and data center solutions, announced a new Universal class of ICE Cube, the company's modular data center for extreme server and storage densities. The new model is designed to accommodate all SGI server and storage systems, says CIOL. Each ICE Cube is a self-contained data center deployable in a 20-foot or 40-foot ISO standard shipping container. The Universal ICE Cube class can scale to 46,080 cores and 29.8 petabytes of storage.

Rick Chapek, SGI senior vice president of hardware engineering, offered the following comments:

Our new Universal ICE Cube data centers extend SGI's leadership in modular data center innovation, allowing us to offer our customers greater flexibility in design and deployment. SGI can now offer targeted ICE Cube configurations across vertical markets that span technical computing, federal government and defense, oil and gas, and Internet, meeting customer specific application and deployment needs.

Data Center Knowledge reports that SGI will produce air-cooled versions of the data center in addition to water-chilled models for more efficient deployments in cool and dry climates.