Momentum's been building around enterprise solid-state storage for a couple of years, but IBM's announcement today of plans to purchase Texas Memory Systems (TMS) shows we're into a new era.
Now, the question won't be whether to use this method of storage, but how to include it in your IT plans, especially given the advent of big-data. "Solid-state storage is transforming every part of IT," wrote storage analyst Stephen Foskett in a blog earlier this month.
TMS, in fact, has been selling IT transformation for years. An early player in the Flash-based storage market, the 34-year-old company sells rackmount systems and PCIe cards under its RamSan brand. The purpose of these solutions is to improve the performance of IT systems, using less power and smaller form factors.
Performance and throughput are getting more important than ever, thanks to big-data, cloud infrastructures, and the need for more and better storage in-house -- at lower-than-ever prices.
TMS makes its own solid-state storage modules with its own controllers and designs. It claims patented RAID technologies -- an important feature, given that early solid-state storage systems were sometimes accused of being less durable than hard-disk drives.
IBM, which sponsors Internet Evolution, plans to buy TMS for an undisclosed sum later this year. Plans are for all 100-odd employees to be retained in their present facilities, which are headquartered in Houston, Texas. CEO Holly Frost, himself something of a folk hero, will stay on with IBM, though his title has yet to be announced.
“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," Holly said in IBM's prepared statement. "With the global reach of IBM, we expect to grow the engineering staff and product lines much faster than we could before."
IBM says it will continue to "invest in and support the TMS product portfolio, and will look to integrate over time TMS technologies into a variety of solutions including storage, servers, software, and PureSystems offerings."
That's significant, since PureSystems represents IBM's strategic direction in IT systems.
At least one analyst likes the proposed deal. “This should be a great fit for both IBM and TMS customers and business partners, perhaps even for some of IBM technology partners,” said Greg Schulz, of consultancy Server and StorageIO, in an email to me today. “This also gives IBM technology to which they can leverage some of their other IP and recent acquisitions such as real-time compression, [data deduplication], thin provisioning, NAS file and object access...”
TMS competes with a growing roster of solid-state storage vendors, a complicated market in which to be a buyer, given the many claims for technical differentiators that are tough to assess. One thing: IBM's purchase of TMS may signal IBM's dissatisfaction with another notable solid-state storage player, Fusion-io.
Whatever the future holds, however, one thing is clear: IBM is banking on solid-state storage as a key element of future IT infrastructure.
That's a good solution, mhhfive. That is my thinking, that we will discover and develop total new solutions that will make better use of technology - "discovery-driven planning"!
It'll be hard to beat tape storage for archival purposes, but SSD storage has it's own advantages that tape can't match. But I'm not sure SSD is well-suited for archival storage just yet.... especially when SSD has known failure rates that are much higher than tape.
But maybe when retrieval time isn't so important we'll be storing data on DNA.. a gram of DNA can hold exabytes of information! And it's easily replicated once it's made....
Agreed, Mary. As I stated, that was the design several years ago. The reality of today with a wide array of technologies, better scales to the demand.
I think that is the advantage of today, and the future, to not utilize a single solution, but to have the advantage of an array of technologies that fit the demand and can take better advantage of the benefits of different types (whether they be cost, longivity and integrity, access, etc.).
That was where I see the important development, in applying the right technologies to solve the problems Mitch raised.
Has tiered storage gone out of fashion? While I had my back turned?
Seriously, storage is expensive and the technologies required are sufficiently resource-intensive that IT pros look for incremental implementation and savings anywhere in the process. Whatever is cheapest will either remain or be replaced. Just my 2 pence.
Intriguing question. I wonder if they will develop a hybrid approach that stores the content in one format and considers a deliverable based on functions/demand? The ideas being worked on a few years ago used a type of tiered access with a "jukebox" design, where the integrity was consistent, but the design variables were in the access through different tiers of delivery.
I believe it will be an important area of development.
DHagar - I definitely think we'll see choices of technologies for different storage applications.
One question that intrigues me: How do you archive data, not for months or years but for centuries? This is an issue being faced in university research. As far as I know, it's a dynamic process; every five years, archivists have to check the media, determine whether data has been corrupted and whether the data formats are still readable.
@RDV you bring up a good point that with technology evolution and increased volume of deployment, costs should also come down helping to drive more deployment. This has been predicted for SSD (flash based) for several years now however with each improvement in SSD capabilities including capacity, endurance/wear/duty cycle along with cost reductions, similar improvements track on a relative basis for HDD and even tape. So while price reductions will help with flash SSD deployment, price alone is not the only barrier today or even near term. However to your point, vendors will see benefits as some customers go all flash SSD, while others continue to use a mix of SSD, HDD, tape and cloud.
@Greg: Once most of the systems/enterprise start using SSD, eventually the cost per storage will reduce, improve the SSD technology and will lead to more compact systems...
IBM being one of the oldest players to make use of the SSD technology, will make the most out of this buyout and enable more compact products...
Mitch, don't you think that that will be the answer to the future - having an array of technologies available to serve the storage needs, both short-term and long-term?
When one knows what they want to store, for how long, etc., and then has a choice of price/functions to best fit that storage need, they will be able to select the type of storage best designed to fill that need.
I had the opportunity to work with Ray Norda (from Novell), in the late 90's and he envisioned storage arrays (actually somewhat along the lines of today's cloud). It is all coming together now.
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