IBM has announced it had completed its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a privately held company specialized in solid-state storage technologies. Analysts believe that IBM’s Texas Memory Systems buy indicates flash storage will play a prominent role in meeting customer demand for efficient and effective data centers.

TMS designs and sells solid state memory solutions as the RamSan family of shared rackmount systems and PCI Express cards. The products are designed to help companies improve system performance and reduce such critical issues in the data center as server sprawl, power consumption, cooling, and floor space requirements. Leveraging such solutions can help organizations save money, improve performance and invest more in innovation.

"Flash technology is a game changer for our clients and IBM is committed to delivering industry-leading Flash-optimized capabilities as a cornerstone of our Smarter Storage strategy. The TMS solutions extend our broad portfolio of Flash-optimized storage arrays and flash optimization software, providing our clients unmatched value," said Brian Truskowski, general manager at IBM system storage and networking.

Solid-State Storage Gaining Importance

Flash storage technologies are maturing and becoming more prominent in customers’ data centers, which leads to market consolidation as major data center vendors (including EMC with its May 2012 XtremIO buy and now IBM with its purchase of TMS) begin to acquire flash storage providers for enhanced capabilities. According to TBR, TMS is a perfect fit for IBM as both companies concentrate on industry-specific solutions.

"TMS and IBM have portfolio, customer base and go-to-market synergies that IBM will leverage to accelerate broader campaigns such as smarter computing and smarter storage. Specifically, TMS’ concept of vertically integrated flash storage systems complements IBM’s own industry-specific, workload-optimized approach. TMS technologies will be leveraged to enhance IBM’s value-add proposition, enabling IBM to deliver improved business value to customers in key industries such as financial services, e-commerce, HPC and telecom," said Ms. Macomber.

IDC estimates the amount of solid state storage solutions being shipped into the enterprise will grow significantly, reaching nearly 3EB by 2016.

“IBM understands the positive and dramatic impact that solid state technology can have on storage and server infrastructures, and once the acquisition is complete we look forward to advancing the technology even further. With the global reach of IBM, we expect to grow the engineering staff and product lines much faster than we could before,” said Holly Frost, founder and chief executive officer of TMS.

TMS employs approximately 100 people. The deal is expected to close later in 2012. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Tags: IBM, SSD, Flash, NAND