Texas Memory Systems
Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS) was an American corporation that designed and manufactured solid-state disks (SSDs) and digital signal processors (DSPs).
Based in Houston, Texas, they supply these two product categories (directly as well as OEM and reseller partners) to large enterprise and government organizations.
[8][9] TMS was founded in 1978 in Houston, Texas by Holly Frost to address a need in seismic processing for the oil and gas industry.
[10][1][11] Around 1988, TMS designed and sold hundreds of SAM-600/800 (Shared Attached Memory) storage enclosures mainly to the United States Department of Defense.
[12][11] The SAM-300, a 512 MB Solid State Disk, is notable as being a reference high-speed data store to optimize and benchmark other bottlenecks in computing systems, such as Network File System (NFS) and Local area networks (LANs), as other storage media at the time were not fast enough to expose these bottlenecks.
[16][17][18] In 2000, TMS started working on a new line of SSD products, the SAM-500/520, that would feature standard interfaces and protocols such as Fibre Channel.
The product doubled the Fibre Channel interface speed to 2 Gbps[22] and added a new mode of operation called DataSynch.
[20] TMS would later release a 1 Terabyte (TB) solid state disk solution called Tera-RamSan on February 26, 2003 which was composed of 32 RamSan-220 units spread across two racks.
The solution would consume 5 KW of power, support up to 2,000 Logical unit numbers (LUNs), and service over 2 million IOPs.
It provided up to 64 GB of DRAM for user data storage, up to eight 2 Gbps Fibre Channel ports, and increased the performance up to 250,000 IOPs.
[24] With Active Backup enabled, reads and writes would go only to memory just like DataSynch mode, but a background task would continually backup the data stored in memory to the hard disk drives offering the benefit of always having the user data backed up similar to Triple-Mirror mode.
The system added support for IBM Chipkill based ECC protection and increased the number of backup hard disk drives to 4.
[33] This product, along with the RamSan-400, was the foundation for the Oracle Accelerator Kit which bundled a RamSan with QLogic InifiBand switches and Host Channel Adapters (HCA)s.[34] TMS pivoted with the storage market and on September 17, 2007 announced a new 4U rack-mount enterprise solid state disk product, the RamSan-500, using NAND Flash memory as the primary user data storage medium instead of DRAM.
[2] This coincides with a general consolidation in the industry such as SanDisk's acquisition of Pliant earlier in the year, a series of run-ups to IPO announcements such as Violin Memory, as well as new startups such as Pure Storage entering the market.
The acquisition was completed on October 1, 2012, and the TMS products, services, and employees were integrated into the IBM Systems and Technology Group (STG).
[43] As part of the acquisition, TMS was subjected to the IBM Blue Wash process,[44] and the existing RamSan product line was re-released with IBM branding FlashSystem and an announcement of a $1B USD investment in research and development to design, create, and integrate new Flash solutions into its existing product portfolio.
