In what could be one of the most important acquisitions of the year, IBM today announced plans to acquire Texas Memory Systems. While the details will be presented later on today, we think this is an excellent move on the part of IBM. Texas Memory brings a deep technical bench and excellent leadership that will allow IBM to differentiate itself from other large storage vendors.

As we described in our article “IBM Storage Makes Its SSD Case” this purchase significantly strengthens IBM’s SSD Strategy. As the Texas Memory products are integrated into the IBM portfolio it puts IBM on par, if not ahead of EMC for completeness of flash offering.

Now the race will be to see who can address the integration of all of these flash domains (server, network, storage) as well as automate these domains. Doing so is a key requirement in eliminating performance sprawl as we describe in our latest chalktalk video:

See below for more information on reasons why Texas Memory was so attractive to IBM:

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