History (1993): StorageTek to Buy Amperif

Storage Technology (Louisville, CO) has signed a letter of intent to buy Amperif Corp. (Chatsworth, CA), a privately-held company specialized in RAID subsystems for Unisys computers.

These two last years, Amperif had signed agreements with Comparex Informationsysteme GmbH, Pacific Rim and Memorex Telex NV.

STK will issue 1.3 million new shares of common stock to Amperif shareholders and will set aside about 600,000 shares for warrants and employee stock options, valuing the company at $75.3 million at the time of the announcement.

Amperif’s last product, Viking, would be the fastest RAID-5 for mainframes in the market with a 200MB/s transfer rate. It includes 52 controller cards and up to 144 Winchester drives for a maximum capacity of 350GB.

STK expects the Viking to be available in the second half of next year.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 67, published on August 1993.