IBM Plans to Acquire Texas Memory Systems

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IBM has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS), a privately held Houston, Texas-based company with about 100 employees, that focuses on solid-state flash optimized systems and solutions, including the RamSan family of external rack-mounted storage, as well as PCIe cards for internal storage that fit inside servers.

I've mentioned Solid-State Drive storage quite a few times over the past few years in this blog, which included some great interactions with my friends over at Texas Memory Systems. Here's a quick look:

December 2006

In my now infamous blog post [Hybrid, Solid State and the future of RAID], I resort to a deck of [Tarot cards] in an effort to fight [writer's block] responding to query about combining solid-state with spinning disk. In the original post, I poked fun at Texas Memory Systems having the slogan "World's Fastest Storage".  Woody Hutsell, then VP of marketing for Texas Memory Systems, explained that the reason that TMS did not have faster benchmark results was because it did not have a million dollars to buy the fastest IBM UNIX server.

January 2008

In my post [Good News and Bad News], I mentioned that Texas Memory Systems has an impressive SPC benchmark result. The Storage Performance Council [SPC] publishes the benchmarking industry standard by which all block-based storage devices are measured. It looks like the TMS performance test department finally got the million-dollar IBM server they needed for this.  

My colleagues in marketing were not amused, afraid that mentioning small companies like TMS would give them a huge boost in marketing awareness, above and beyond what TMS could do on their own modest marketing budget, similar to the [Colbert Bump]. I could call it the Pearson Bump. If you first heard of Texas Memory Systems from my blog, or bought TMS products based on my discussion, please post a comment below!

August 2008

IBM made history as the first major storage vendor to [break the 1 million IOPS barrier with Solid State Disk]. The project was known as "Quicksilver", and was able to demonstrate that a product like SAN Volume Controller with Solid-State Drives (SSD) can indeed provide a significant boost in performance to external disk arrays. The IBM 2145-CF8 and 2145-CG8 models allow up to four SSD in each node. I was asked not to blog the entire month of August, so that our upcoming September announcements would get more notice, but I couldn't resist covering Quicksilver. The original post had mentioned Texas Memory Systems, but were later removed to avoid the "Pearson Bump".

August 2011

In my post [Day 2 IBM Storage University - Solutions Expo - TMS After-party], I mentioned that I attended the TMS after-party. Texas Memory Systems had just been qualified as Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage behind the IBM SAN Volume Controller, and the two products work extremely well together for IBM Easy Tier, the sub-volume automated tiering capability to optimize storage performance. I was able to catch up with my friend Erik Eyberg, and meet CEO and Founder Holly Frost.

Last year, IBM published the results of the [2011 IBM IT Decision Makers Survey]. Some of the key findings:

• Nearly half (43 percent) of IT decision makers say they have plans to use SSD technology in the future or are already using it in their datacenter. Solid-state can refer to both volatile Random Access Memory (RAM) and non-volatile Flash, and Texas Memory Systems has built solutions around both types. The survey question referred to non-volatile Flash Solid-State Drives (SSD) that do not require a battery to keep the data from fading away after the power goes out. Nearly all storage in the datacenter has volatile Random Access Memory (RAM).
  
  
• Speeding delivery of data was the motivation behind 75 percent of respondents who plan to use or already use SSD technology. I would have thought this would have been 100 percent, but the other options included reduced energy consumption, and improved drive reliability, which are both also true with Solid-State Drives.
  
  
• However, for those who were not using SSD today, the major factor was cost, according to 71 percent of respondents. On a Dollar-per-GB basis, Solid-State Drives continue to be anywhere from 10 to 25 times more expensive spinning disk. Last year's tsunami in Japan, and the floods in Thailand, have caused spinning disk prices to rise to cover component shortages, thereby shrinking the price gap between SSD and spinning disk.
  
  
• Nearly half (48 percent) say they plan on increasing storage investments in the area of virtualization, cloud (26 percent) and flash memory/solid state (24 percent) and analytics (22 percent).

technorati tags: IBM, Texas Memory Systems, TMS, Woody Hutsell, Solid-state, NAND, SSD