IBM reveals a "strategic initiative" worth $1 billion to drive enterprise adoption of flash technology optimised for social media, mobility and big data workloads.
The investment includes the 2012 acquisition (for an unspecified sum) of shared rackmount and server-based PCIe flash storage developer Texas Memory Systems (TMS) and 12 Centres of Competency set to open by end 2013.
The UK, France and Germany will host such centres, which should allow customers to run test out IBM flash solutions with real-world data.
“The economics and performance of flash are at a point where the technology can have a revolutionary impact on enterprises, especially for transaction-intensive applications,” IBM says. “The confluence of Big Data, social, mobile and cloud technologies is creating an environment in the enterprise that demands faster, more efficient, access to business insights, and flash can provide that access quickly.”
A final flash-related announcement from the company is the FlashSystem 820, a flash storage array based on TMS technology. According to IBM it stores up to 24TB of data in 1U of rack space, or around 1 petabyte in rack using less than 14kW of power.
Of course, IBM is hardly the first company investing in flash-- EMC recently unveiled the XtremSF flash storage portfolio while NetApp launched FlashRay, an all-flash storage strategy complete with application-optimised architecture.
