IBM’s Texas Memory Systems Acquisition – Integration And Virtualisation

IBM TMS Highlights

• Following acquisition TMS recorded a record amount of business in Q4 2012
• Added 30 new accounts
• Offers PCIe and rack-mounted products
• Succeeds in shipping to customers implementing IBM SVC
• Also fits IBM’s ITCFC and workload optimised system strategies
• Is expanding from the USA adding staff in EMEA and ‘growth’ markets
• Answers the question for IBM about what to do with SSD and Flash

We listened in to a call from Kevin Powell and Erik Eyberg of IBM and Texas Memory Systems (TMS) to learn about what’s been happening since acquisition. You’ll be interested to learn more about the success of flash memory and the plans IBM has for the coming year.

The RAMSAN Products Fit With IBM STG’s Current And Targeted Business

We’ve already written about IBM’s approached to IBM Integrated Tiering and Cooperative Flash-based Cache, where it can use the TMS PCIe-based ‘Gorilla’ RAMSAN 70/80 card to improve the speed of SANs. However this product is not the mainstay of its SSD business: rather its rack-mounted 710/810 (1-5TB or 2-10TB) and especially its flagship 720/820 that make up the majority of its revenues – the culmination of its 20 years building shared Flash/DRAM products. Although there is an inevitable performance degradation to pay for its implementation of enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) as opposed to MLC, the 720/820 1U rack products benefit from avoiding Single Points of Failure (SPoF) – by including RAID 5 for instance – and the sharing of storage through Fibre Channel and/or Infiniband connections.
TMS’s Flash products are used in a number of key application areas, such as:

• OLTP – for speeding up Oracle and now IBM DB2 of course
• OLAP Analytical applications – again traditionally used for Oracle, but applicable to IBM’s PureData Analytic systems
• Virtual Infrastructure – for VDI, consolidated virtual infrastructure, server virtualisation and user profiles
• HPC/Computational applications – used for ‘original Big Data issues’
• Cloud-scale infrastructure – where IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) – similar to Hadoop’s HDFS – comes into play

TMS reports its strongest vertical markets as Finance, Government, eCommerce, HPC and Telecom, with strong recent growth in Healthcare. The clear match between its business and IBM’s (current and targeted) business was no doubt a strong reason for its acquisition.

Q4 2012 Success Stories

The 2 presenters gave us some tantalising insights into Q4 2012 business. For instance:

• It was the strongest quarter for revenues of all time
• It engaged in a number of training activities with direct and partner salesforces as well as shipping ‘enablement materials’ to these and other 10k IBM sellers worldwide in Q4
• It had strong revenue in the USA, especially in Public sector
• The majority of revenues came from the new 720/820 High Availability (HA) systems
• It shipped 1PB of usable Flash shipped in Q4 (total capacity was larger taking into account redundant features)
• It doubled its total shipments and had 6 times eMLC shipments compared with Q4 2011
• It added 30 new customers in the quarter

We talked to IBM STG some time ago about its acquisition strategy, which includes targeting companies with innovative products which will benefit from a wider salesforce – a strategy which is clearly working early on for TMS.
Specific customer wins in the quarter included:

• A bioinformatics organisation in the UK (placing 4 820s in competition with EMC, Violin Memory and WhipTail)
• A German service provider (2 810s in competition with EMC, NetApp, HDS and Violin Memory)
• A US government agency (2 810s for catalogue management)
• An existing US commodities exchange (2 720 and 820 systems)
• Cegeka, a Belgian ICT provider (2 820s winning against HP 3Par)
• Kruger (3 820s behind an IBM SVC installation to accelerate Oracle databases)
• Thomson Reuters (5 820s for trading applications)

To expand the business IBM is adding specialist Flash-sales to the old TMS team, expanding in EMEA (a process started in December) and aiming for a push into ‘growth’ markets later in the first half of 2013. It has also signed distributor agreements in the USA and EMEA at the end of 2012 to help with its transition to a 2-tier channel model.

Some Conclusions – Great Scope For Further Integration

TMS products have been certified amongst many others for use with IBM’s SVC storage hypervisor – in fact there are 8 RAMSAN on the list today rather than the 1 shown on Figure 1, which comes from last year. We’re particularly positive about its opportunities for this type of business going forward, as the sharing of Flash memory throughout a network has for many major benefits over merely integrating it as part of selected servers or within specific storage arrays.
We’ve also spent some time looking at IBM’s new PureData systems (more in an up-coming post). With integration the TMS products will undoubtedly find their way into these and other IBM appliances as well as in ITCFC implementations.
The main question for all system suppliers regarding SSD and Flash is – everyone knows it’s important and disruptive, but where to put it? For IBM acquiring TMS is the answer – they can be built into servers and arrays using PCIe slots, but more importantly are independent rack-mounted offerings to be shared on the network and integrated into a raft of workload-optimised systems.