Rackable Systems sold to Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle and Nvidia as they filled buildings with computers. The Milpitas, California company packed servers into tight racks and solved the heat and power problems that came with them. Its quarterly revenue swung hard, from $18.1 million to $34.8 million in one quarter of 2004, then back down to $23.0 million. It went public in June 2005 at $12 a share.

Built for the Server Farm

Rackable was founded in 1999 by a team that included Giovanni Coglitore, Nikolai Gallo and Jack Randall. They saw that big data centers ran thousands of servers and fought the same limits: floor space, power use, heat and repair time. Rackable's answer was its Foundation Series, high-density rack servers built for scale-out data centers. By its IPO it had sold to more than 100 customers in internet, government, finance, energy and biotech.

From Rackable to SGI to HPE

Rackable priced its IPO at $12 a share in June 2005 and listed on Nasdaq as RACK. In 2009 it bought the assets of Silicon Graphics, the famous workstation and supercomputer maker, and renamed itself Silicon Graphics International. It sold high-performance computers as SGI for seven more years. In November 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought SGI for $7.75 a share in cash.

Cover: Articles of Glass on Three Shelves, William Henry Fox Talbot. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for objects lined up on shelves (server racks).