IBM said it will acquire Texas Memory Systems, a privately held company that focuses on high-performance flash storage.

Texas Memory Systems (TMS) offers Flash based rack systems and interconnect cards. In some respects, TMS is in the same ballpark as Fusion-io and similar companies.

IBM's motives are relatively obvious. The company plans to push more solid state storage into data centers. TMS provides the technology and IBM has the sales channel.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Big Blue said it will support TMS products---notably its RamSam line of systems and PCIe cards---but look to integrate the Flash technologies into its hardware gear such as Smarter Storage as well as its latest PureSystems.

TMS has a family of systems under the RamSan brand as well as PCIe storage and digital signal processing tools.