Ibis Systems Inc, founded in 1980 with ambitious plans to become a new force in the IBM mainframe disk drive business, failed in that attempt but carved a successful niche for itself manufacturing big disks for use with scientific supercomputers. All went well while Cray Research was flourishing and Control Data’s ETA Systems was chugging along, but with the closure of the latter and a slowdown in orders for the former, chill winds are blowing through Ibis’ Westlake Village, California headquarters. The company has fired almots half its workforce to bring it down to 125 from 245, and is closing its facilities in Westlake Village and in Duarte, and will consolidate everything at its Camarillo base. The $45m-a-year firm, which now gets almost all its business from Cray, has plans to diversify with an 8Gb subsystem and 2Gb drive for VMEbus Unix sttaions.
