Ed Walsh, VP of marketing and strategy for IBM storage, said the enhancements allow the DS8870 to perform analytics faster and represent more than a step upgrade from the DS8800.

“The platform is brand new,” Walsh said. “I think it should be called the DS9000. We can do operational analytics faster. This allows us to be predictive.”

Outside of the processor, however, the DS8870 has a lot in common with the DS8800. They support the same number of drives and capacity (2.3 PB), sixteen 8 Gbps Fibre Channel or FICON ports and from two to 16 host adapters. Other improvements include the DS8870 ships with all Full Disk Encryption (FDE) drives (customers can turn off encryption if they don’t want it) and greater VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) support than the DS8800.

The performance boost will have to be impressive for IBM to compete with EMC’s VMAX and Hitachi Data Systems Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), considering that IBM has been dropping storage market share to those vendors.

IBM submitted benchmarks to the Storage Performance Council (SPC) to validate its performance claims. The DS8870’s SPC-2 score of 15,423.66 MBps is the highest for that benchmark, which measures aggregate data rate for large file processing, large database query and video on demand workloads.

For maximum I/O request throughput, the IBM DS8870’s SPC-1 score was 451,082.27 IOPS, the top score for an enterprise array without any solid-state drives (SSDs). The DS8870 does support SSDs, but none were used in the benchmark testing.

EMC doesn’t submit benchmarks for VMAX. The HDS VSP had an SPC-2 score of 13,147.87 last month and an SPC-1 score of 269,506.69 last November. However, HPS had better price/performance scores on both benchmarks because the systems it used cost roughly half of IBM’s for both tests.

Analyst Greg Schulz of StorageIO Group said the performance boost is expected of a new system but said the FDE support can also prove valuable.

“What catches my eye in addition to the usual performance and capacity improvements are the standard support for full disk encryption (FDE) to protect data at rest, and to also reduce the TCO and improve the ROI for storage systems when it comes time to dispose of hundreds and thousands of disks,” he said. “Depending on how it’s deployed, FDE has the potential to shave not just hours, but days and weeks off of the time or cost associated with running secure erase at the end of a product’s useful life. That’s something that organizations should be doing.”

Industry insiders expect a wave of acquisitions of the smaller solid-state storage systems vendors by larger companies. EMC started the process when it acquired XtremIO for $430 million last May.

IBM did not disclose its price for TMS, but it acquired a broader set of flash technologies than XtremIO brought EMC. XtremIO had one product – an all-flash array – that hadn’t yet shipped. EMC plans to bring the system into the market next year. TMS has several RamSan all-flash arrays plus server-side PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) cards that compete with EMC’s VFCache product. And while EMC viewed the XtremIO system as a project (“Project X” to be precise), IBM picks up a set of TMS products already shipping.

The TMS RamSan portfolio consists of seven rackmount all-flash storage systems, three rackmount RAM systems and two PCIe flash storage cards.

One reason IBM bought TMS is that it isn’t a startup like most of the other solid-state array vendors. TMS has been around for more than 30 years, and has been selling flash storage systems since 2007.

“We looked at anybody that has any name value in the marketplace, and a couple of them went down to the wire,” said Robert Cancilla, VP and business line executive of IBM Systems Storage. “TMS has maturity in the marketplace. It has proven technology, and we got good feedback from their clients.”

TMS has been around since 1978 but remains relatively small with 100 employees. It started with memory systems for seismic processing for the oil and gas industry. TMS was among the first solid-state storage vendors, shipping its first NAND flash system – the RamSan-500 – in 2007. It added its first PCIe flash storage system – the RamSan-20 – in 2009, and last month upgraded its PCIe flash cards to allow them to natively boot server operating systems.

“TMS is the grand-daddy of the SSD industry, both for DRAM and flash-based products,” said analyst Greg Schulz, president of StorageIO Group. “IBM can phase the TMS PCIe flash blades into their server and storage products. At least on paper, IBM has technologies, including real-time compression, NAS, virtualization and dedupe, to wrap around an SSD appliance.”

Cancilla said several TMS customers are using its RamSan arrays behind IBM’s SAN Volume Controller (SVC) virtualization system, and IBM knows the systems work together. “Other vendors’ products have not worked as well with SVC, so we had first-hand knowledge about them,” he said.

Cancilla said IBM will sell RamSan systems in their current form when the deal closes, probably late this year. The long-term strategy is to integrate TMS technology with other IBM storage, servers, software and PureSystems products. Cancilla said IBM’s Netezza data analytics product could benefit from using TMS solid-state technology.

He said IBM will work on integrating Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software with RamSan systems to provide data management. TMS’s data management is rudimentary because the vendor focuses on high performance.

Cancilla said IBM is most interested in the RamSan flash arrays, but also sees demand for the PCIe flash cards. He said IBM would continue to sell Fusion-io PCIe cards with its System x servers, but said RamSan’s PCIe cards also compete with some of Fusion-io products.

IBM uses solid-state as a cache with its XIV storage platform and offers SSDs in its other storage platforms, but Cancilla said with TMS “we’re not handcuffed by the drive form factor anymore.”

IBM and Actifio said they will offer bundles to cloud service providers and VARs. The packages include Actifio’s PAS data protection with IBM DS3500 Express, IBM Storwize V7000, XIV Gen3 and SAN Storage Volume Controller (SVC) systems.

IBM has its own backup, replication, disaster recovery and data management products, so it’s unclear why it needs Actifio. But Mike Mcclurg, IBM VP of global midmarket sales, said Actifio provides one tool to handle all those functions.

“We approach managed service providers form a business perspective,” he said. “How can a partnership with IBM grow their business? It’s challenging for managed service providers to find cost effective data solutions that requires cobbling together a lot of backup, replication, snapshot, and data management tools. Actifio is an elegant way of replacing a lot of technology and overlapping software products.”

Maybe the partnership is the beginning of a deeper relationship between the vendors. Actifio president Jim Sullivan is former VP of worldwide sales for IBM system storage. He maintains that the startup is keeping its partnership options open, but he is also counting on IBM to bring Actifio into deals the startup can’t land on its own.

“This is not an exclusive deal,” he said. “But we’re driving this with IBM. Showing up with service providers with IBM is a great opportunity for us to get reach and credibility.”