Imperial Snaps Out of It

Solid-state disk player Imperial Technology Inc. has returned from limbo, hiring back much of the staff it let go last summer and getting ready to launch a massive 1-Tbyte system.

"The rumors of our death were greatly exaggerated," Robert David, CEO of Imperial, waggishly quips.

In mid-2002, Imperial was hit by a sales drought and it was forced to lay off around half its staff, David says. That left the El Segundo, Calif., company with around 20 employees (see Imperial Goes Into 'Hibernation Mode').

But after landing several new customers, Imperial has hired back everyone it let go -- and then some, David says -- for a current headcount of 50. Major new accounts include Logitech Inc., Netflix Inc., and Southwest Airlines Co.

And on Feb. 1, it's planning to come out with a humongous 1-Tbyte solid-state (SSD) system -- priced at $2 million -- that will be able to process 1 million I/O operations per second (IOPS). The system, called the MegaRam-10K, fits in two 70-inch racks and requires 800 pounds of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) batteries.SSD systems consist of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) modules designed to eliminate I/O bottlenecks for high-performance applications such as transaction-processing databases. Other SSD vendors include Solid Data Systems, Platypus Technology Inc., and Texas Memory Systems Inc.

A cool two mil is a lot to drop for memory, but David notes that the price of DRAM chips is falling so fast that the same system would have cost $5 million a year or so ago. "It's becoming more cost-effective to put in large amounts of solid-state disk," he says.

David claims Imperial has two customers already lined up for the MegaRam-10K, though he wouldn't identify them by name. He says one is a large telco in Asia that is operating a 3G wireless network that transmits pictures and other rich media messages; the other is a large financial institution based in Manhattan.

Imperial also recently hired a VP of research and development, Peter Berkman, formerly with SeeBeyond Technology Corp., a developer of enterprise software. Berkman oversees a software development group of 10.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com