Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS) was an American corporation that designed and manufactured solid-state disks (SSDs) and digital signal processors (DSPs). TMS was founded in 1978 and that same year introduced their first solid-state drive, followed by their first digital signal processor. In 2000 they introduced the RamSan line of SSDs. Based in Houston, Texas, they supply these two product categories (directly as well as OEM and reseller partners) to large enterprise and government organizations.
TMS has been supplying SSD products to the market longer than any other company.
On August 16, 2012, IBM Corporation announced a definitive agreement to acquire Texas Memory Systems, Inc. This acquisition was completed as planned on October 1, 2012.
History
TMS was founded in 1978 in Houston, Texas by Holly Frost to address a need in seismic processing for the oil and gas industry. The company's first product, the CMPS was a 16 Kilobyte (KB) custom SSD designed for Gulf Oil.
SAM product line
Around 1988, TMS designed and sold hundreds of SAM-600/800 (Shared Attached Memory) storage enclosures mainly to the United States Department of Defense. These enclosures used 128 Megabytes (MB) of Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) for data storage and several high-speed Emitter-coupled logic (ECL) inputs and outputs for data transfer. These systems were mainly used to acquire and analyze signals in real time.
When the 1980s oil glut caused disruption in the oil and gas industry, TMS shifted focus away from SSDs and onto Digital signal processing products. The previously-designed SAM storage systems were enhanced by adding in a custom designed DSP board. Prior to this added DSP capability, to analyze a signal, a user would have to send the signal to the SAM storage for staging, engage a separate system to perform digital signal processing, then store the result back to the SAM system for analyzing. Adding the DSP processor into the storage system itself meant that the data could be stored, processed, and analyzed all within the SAM system itself, relieving the host systems from processing duties. With this change in product focus, the SAM product line became known for DSP more than for SSD. The company would release more DSP systems under the SAM brand name in the 1990s: The SAM-2000 (1990), the SAM-300/350, and the SAM-450 (1997). 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.
In 2004, TMS partnered with StarGen (later acquired by Dolphin Interconnect Solutions) to integrate the SAM-650 DSP system with the StarFabric switched interconnect. The solution would support military-grade embedded applications by providing 192 Gigaflops of processing performance and 16 gigabits of bandwidth.
XP product line
While the company was developing SAM systems that attached to multiple hosts, it also started developing DSP solutions on PCI cards to address the single-host market. The XP-15, XP-30, XP-35, and XP-100 products were released to the market and were architecturally modeled after the SAM systems. The XP-30 and XP-35 utilize the TM-44 DSP, and the XP-100 utilize the TM-100 DSP. Both of these DSP chips were custom designed ASICs from TMS.
RamSan product line
RAM based products
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 SAM-520 was the first SSD product from TMS to use the RamSan brand. It featured 64 Gigabytes (GB) of DRAM for user data storage and up to 15 1Gb/s Fibre Channel interfaces.
TMS officially entered the commercial storage market on April 10, 2001 with the announcement of the RamSan-210 which featured up to 32 GB of DRAM for user data storage, 4 Fibre Channel ports and promised 200,000 IOPs in a 2U rack-mountable enclosure. In order to assure that the user data written to DRAM would be persistent, in addition to writing user data to DRAM, the 210 also wrote user data to two mirrored hot swappable hard disk drives, a feature dubbed Triple-Mirror mode. It also included redundant uninterruptible power supplies which would power the unit for a short time during a brownout, and allow the system to safely shut down in case of a total power loss.