Violin Memory Acquires GridIron for Acceleration and Caching

Violin Memory, which specializes in high-performance flash-based storage systems, has acquired GridIron Systems, a start-up developing data center application acceleration technology. Financial terms were not disclosed.

GridIron offers a TurboCharger Appliance to optimize the performance of application traffic and data workloads traversing the SAN fabric. The appliance uses patented SetRanking technology to manage all “high value” reads from the storage array, enabling the array to focus on writes to disk.  The company has claimed a 2-10X application performance improvment. Deployment scenarios include online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehouses, virtualization and big data analytics.

Violin Memory, which provides tier 1 Flash Memory Arrays, said the GridIron acquisition brings sophisticated intellectual property for SAN-based caching and application acceleration.

“The acquisition of GridIron Systems complements and expands Violin Memory’s strategy of offering memory-based solutions that accelerate business critical applications while optimizing IT infrastructures,” said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. “The expanded talent, technology and intellectual property position Violin Memory at the forefront of the ongoing transformation of enterprise data centers to memory-based architectures.”

http://www.gridironsystems.com

• GridIron is based in Sunnyvale, California.  Violin Memory is based in Mountain View, California.
  
• GridIron’s founders include Som Sikdar (previously the founder of Shomiti Systems (Finisar) and Force10 Networks) and Herb Schneider (a founder and VP of engineering at Extreme Networks).