IBM to buy Texas flash-memory firm

IBM will buy Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a provider of high-performance flash memory products, for an undisclosed sum, the IT giant said Thursday. Flash, a solid state data storage technology, is an increasingly hot market, as it promises to reduce the energy and space requirements of storage systems in data centers. Market research firm IDC expects the amount of solid-state storage products to be shipped to enterprises to reach about 3 exabytes of storage capacity by 2016. Holly Frost, TMS founder and CEO, said IBM’s global reach would put the memory company’s engineering-staff and product-line growth on the fast track. “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,” Frost said. IBM

said it would invest in and support the Texas company’s product portfolio and look to integrate its technologies into storage, server, software and other solutions, once the deal was completed. Houston-based TMS provides RamSam shared rack-mount solid-state storage systems and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) cards. Among recent signs of increasing adoption of solid-state memory technology was Amazon Web Services’ announcement in July of new high-performance virtual-machine instances available on its Elastic Compute Cloud that used solid state storage. One of IBM’s biggest competitors HP announced in July an all-solid-state storage array by its subsidiary 3Par and seamless integration of the array with its latest Gen8 ProLiant servers. Data Center Talk updates its resources everyday. Visit us to know of the latest technology and standards from the data center world. Please leave your views and comments on DCT Forum