Violin Memory buys Gridiron for fast flash storage access

IDG News Service - Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has acquired Gridiron Systems for an undisclosed sum and plans to use the company's application acceleration smarts with its flash arrays.

Gridiron's operations units have already been integrated into Violin. The two companies are set to formally announce the deal on Monday. Both companies are privately held.

Gridiron sells an appliance that slots in between an enterprise's storage and servers and speeds up access to data in existing storage arrays. It uses flash, memory, software and proprietary hardware and can make databases and applications run 10 times faster, according to Gridiron's website.

Violin plans to use Gridiron's algorithms, which learn about I/O traffic patterns and cache the active dataset of an application, in its flash storage arrays. Gridiron's technology is well-suited to online transaction processing, data warehouses, virtualization and big-data analytics, according to Violin.

Violin also plans to continue selling Gridiron's appliances, eventually making merged products, said Ashish Gupta, Violin's director of product marketing.

Gridiron is based in Sunnyvale, California, while Violin is located in nearby Mountain View.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com