IBM announced today that it plans to buy Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a Houston-based solid state storage company.

TMS sells a family of shared rackmount systems and PICIe cards called RamSan, which are designed to help companies improve performance and reduce server sprawl, power consumption, cooling and floor space requirements.

““The TMS strategy and solution set align well with our Smarter Computing approach to information technology by helping clients realize increased performance and efficiencies at lower costs,” said Brian Truskowski, GM, Systems Storage and Networking at IBM. “Solid state technology, in particular, is a critical component of our new Smarter Storage approach to the design and deployment of storage infrastructures, and part of a holistic approach that exploits flash in conjunction with disk and tape technologies to solve complex problems.”

TMS CEO Holly Frost said, “IBM understands the positive and dramatic impact that solid state technology can have on storage and server infrastructures, and once the acquisition is complete we look forward to advancing the technology even further. With the global reach of IBM, we expect to grow the engineering staff and product lines much faster than we could before.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though IBM expects it to close later this year. TMS has about 100 people on staff.

The amount of solid state storage solutions being shipped to the enterprise is expected to reach nearly 3 exabytes by 2016 (IDC).