IBM is acquiring Texas Memory Systems, which sells RamSan solid state memory appliances and PCIe cards. Terms were not disclosed, though privately-held TMS has been looking for an acquirer for some months in order to scale its business.
IBM is already a reseller of TMS products, though TMS has such relationships with many companies, including most of IBM’s traditional competitors. IBM plans to invest in the company and integrate its products into its hardware and software offerings, with an eye on boosting their performance.
TMS sells rackmount appliances featuring either RAM or Flash storage, and Flash-based PCIe cards. As well as a general trend towards integration of Flash storage into servers, such technologies are finding increasing favour as components of low-latency market data and trading systems, since they offer significant performance gains (over hard disk) with virtually no software development required.
IT industry observers suggest that other solid state storage vendors – such as Fusion-io, Kove and Violin Memory – might now become acquisition targets.
