Imperial Technology Readies Latest Solid State Disk for Caching

Imperial Technology Inc. is preparing to launch its fastest solid state disk to date with a 1U form factor configuration. The product is part of Imperial's MegaRam family-"a next generation of solid state disks in terms of capacity per footprint, function and feature set for the product," notes Imperial's Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Robert David. One of the firms target markets is the financial services industry and it has a client list that includes Knight Securities, Nasdaq, Chase and Instinet. "We target areas where there are certain applications in financial services that are back-office intensive. These include database applications, and other applications that are in need of high performance storage or those that require high write and high read throughput."

David notes that Imperial has been selling the solid state disk for many years, but it has typically been in a 5U form factor, and this new product is in a 1U form factor. It will help a lot of "stack'em and rack'em kind of applications on Wall Street where space is a critical concern to get the highest density possible with the smallest device." He explains that the solid state disk is made up of memory chips so the access time is in microseconds, 100 times faster than a rotating disk.

David suggest that Wall Street firms wouldn't want to put all of their data on these disks, only time sesitive, critical data--because it would be cost prohibitive. However "we think anywhere from 3-5% would be good for this device. So, if you are running a terabyte of disks on a particular application, 3% of that is about 30 gigabytes. That would be how many solid state disks you'd want to buy."

The product is being released on January 29, and will start going into production at securities firms around April. The list price base configuration for a 1 gigabyte MegaRam 1U, is less than $25,000 for a complete subsystem, including ports, memory, battery and disk backup. The vendor's competitors include Quantum and EMC, though EMC can also be used in conjunction with Imperial, David notes.

Knight Securities' Vice President of Operations Charles Attard is a big proponent of Imperial's disk and plans to upgrade to the new disks once they are released. Knight has been using Imperial's disks for caching for the last five years for its trading system, Brass, and for its database.

He explains that although Knight spends "in the millions" annually on Imperial's storage disks, "it pays for itself. We use the solid state disks as caching for the Brass Trading system. One of the biggest reasons for using it is actually the caching speed it gives us for being able to turn over trades. So we get up to the second, so to speak, trade quotes that come over and we are able to do the trades as they come in, you could almost say at lightening speed." He adds, "It saves money ... it makes us money. The units virtually pay for themselves in a short amount of time."

Knight's databases need to be cached because the firm continuously accesses a lot for data from the database. The trading firm puts somewhere between 24-30 gigabytes in cache on the front end. Again he professes, "We've had nothing but positive results. From day one, we've been able to put on our development system double and triple the speed of our existing equipment and it made Knight very successful." Knight uses in the neighborhood of 350-400 gigabytes of solid state disk. In terms of numbers roughly 125-130 units.

Attard says Knight did consider some of Imperial's competitors, but was sold on Imperial's support. "The product is an excellent product, it has gotten good reviews and it has redundancy built in so it has never really failed. It's been proven here at Knight, as we have a 99.999% up time."