IBM said yesterday that it will spend $1 billion on the research and development of new flash memory systems to accompany its various servers, storage, and middleware products.

Of course, IBM is expecting a big return on that investment. IBM already purchased flash memory vendor Texas Memory Systems last October for an undisclosed sum. Along with the $1 billion R&D investment, IBM announced the availability of all-flash storage appliances based on Texas Memory technology.

The suggested price list for the new IBM FlashSystem appliances shows the big investment in solid state storage should be well worth it. The IBM FlashSystem 720 and FlashSystem 820, both 1U-sized rack-mounted systems, start at $16,000 each. A choice between four 8Gbps Fibre Channel or 40Gbps quadruple data rate InfiniBand interface ports adds another $8,000.

Then you actually buy the flash storage. FlashSystem 720 comes with 6TB or 12TB of SLC flash (5TB or 10TB of usable capacity) for $166,000 and $331,000, respectively. FlashSystem 820 comes with 12TB or 24TB (10TB or 20TB usable) of eMLC flash for $166,000 and $331,000, respectively.

SLC flash is well-suited to write-heavy workloads distributed across multiple servers, while eMLC flash is suitable for read-heavy workloads, according to Big Blue.

"FlashSystem 720 and FlashSystem 820 storage systems may deliver significant benefits to server-based infrastructures which depend on large quantities of locally attached flash devices, such as PCIe Flash cards or SAS/SATA SSDs," IBM said. "While locally attached flash devices typically work well for accelerating applications located on single servers, such devices can be more difficult to share across multiple servers, scale to large capacities, and centrally manage than FlashSystem 720 and FlashSystem 820 storage systems. Additionally, FlashSystem 720 and FlashSystem 820 storage systems have sophisticated reliability features like Variable Stripe RAID that are typically not present on locally attached Flash devices."

FlashSystem is at least the fourth flash storage product released by IBM, alongside the Storwize V7000, System Storage DS8870, and XIV Storage System.

IBM's expanded embrace of flash shouldn't be called revolutionary. Old storage industry stalwarts like EMC have been selling flash products into data centers for years, as have a variety of newer vendors like Fusion-io and Violin Memory.

But as it so often does, IBM will likely find a way to make flash storage a profitable part of its business. Already, Sprint Nextel has purchased 150TB of flash storage from IBM. And IBM has a good sales pitch, saying flash will improve data center reliability while cutting response times from milliseconds to microseconds.

"Flash systems can provide up to 90 percent reductions in transaction times for applications like banking, trading, and telecommunications; up to 85 percent reductions in batch processing times in applications like enterprise resource planning and business analytics; and up to 80 percent reductions of energy consumption in data center consolidations and cloud deployments," IBM said.

IBM did not say how many years the $1 billion R&D investment will be spread over. But as part of its sales pitch, it will open 12 "Centers of Competency" across the globe to show customers proof-of-concept scenarios for speeding up performance of workloads such as "credit card processing, stock exchange transactions, manufacturing and order processing systems."