IBM Completes Texas Memory Systems Acquisition
IBM announced on Monday October 1 that it had finalized its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TMS.) This transaction was first announced in mid-August and was analyzed at that time in an Alert sent to Objective Analysis clients.
Here are a few salient points from the Alert:
- TMS is the world’s oldest SSD maker, and has recently made an aggressive move from DRAM to NAND flash, providing very high performance PCIe SSDs and arrays.
- TMS and IBM play into the same market: storage for large-scale computing. Their technologies complement each other, since IBM’s current solid state storage offerings were lightweight compared to those of TMS.
- The acquisition meshes with IBM’s mantra of “Smarter Planet, Smarter Storage, and Smarter Computing.” SSDs improve storage speed while reducing power and space requirements.
Objective Analysis sees this as a good fit that will harness the synergies of two very similarly managed companies to produce very positive results.
Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market
Intel has gotten into the fast-growing and lucrative market for PCIe SSDs. The company has announced a PCIe SSD, the 910, that provides the high performance you would expect of a PCIe drive with the quality guarantees that customers expect of Intel.
Who could blame them? Fusion-io has become a Wall Street darling for creating the PCIe SSD market, and still rides it to continually growing revenues. LSI is fascinated by the growth of its Warp Drive. Micron attained a significant design win at EMC, Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has had success in its own narrow markets, and Virident, OCZ, and STEC have also participated in the PCIe SSD’s market growth.
Intel’s 910 consists of four Hitachi SAS SSD Continue reading
SSD Presence Growing at Oracle OpenWorld
At Oracle’s October OpenWorld conference in San Francisco more exhibit hall space was dedicated to SSDs this year than ever before. That’s because Oracle runs faster on systems with SSDs than on systems without.
Even Oracle ships SSDs in its popular Exadata system, and the company recently announced that it had shipped over 1,000 installations since its introduction in 2009. Continue reading
