IBM to plough $1bn into flash business

Rewritable memory technology now at a point where it can have revolutionary impact on enterprises, claims Big Blue

IBM is making a $1bn (£651m) investment in flash technology after claiming the rewritable memory technology is mature enough to take the enterprise market by storm.

Big Blue said it would blow the nine-figure sum on research and development to design, create and integrate new flash solutions into its servers, storage systems and middleware.

As part of the initiative, IBM plans to open 12 Centres of Competency around the globe, including one in the UK.

Leading on from its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems last August, IBM also last night announced the availability of the IBM FlashSytem line of all-flash storage appliances.

Explaining the investment, IBM said flash can speed response time for information gathering from milliseconds to microseconds. The technology is also more reliable, durable and energy efficient than spinning hard drives because it contains no moving parts, Big Blue added.

"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," said Ambuj Goyal, general manager, Systems Storage, IBM Systems & Technology Group.

"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."

Flash systems can achieve up to 90 per cent reductions in transaction times for applications such as banking, trading and telecoms, IBM added, and up to 85 per cent reductions in batch process times applications such as ERP and business analytics. Eighty per cent reductions in energy consumption in datacentre consolidations and cloud deployments can also be achieved by flash, the vendor said.