Violin Acquires Gear6 Assets

Violin Memory, Inc. has acquired the technology assets of Mountain View-based Gear6, provider of NAS and Memcached solutions which improve the scalability of dynamic web applications and content.

The venture funded Gear6 portfolio includes over 30 customers and multiple patents related to NFS Caching and Memcached.

“Gear6’s installed base of customers is highly synergistic with our current go-to-market strategy,” said Violin Memory Chief Operating Officer Dixon Doll, Jr. “Gear6 was founded to accelerate data center applications and solve the I/O bottleneck which matches well with Violin’s ‘silicon data center’ vision.”

“Gear6’s proven high speed NFS caching combined with the Violin 3000 10 Terabyte Memory Array will allow us to front end NFS installations solving the performance issues of today’s NAS devices,” said Violin Memory CEO Don Basile, “We have an experienced team with a background in rolling up technology companies and then successfully integrating into the core product roadmap, and we will continue to pursue scaling our company via acquisition when it aligns with our corporate strategy.”

Comments

At first, it's not easy to understand why Violin, in SSDs, wanted to acquire Gear6, in cache solution. In fact, both of them are in IO acceleration. Violin do not offer SSD devices but SSD RAIDs to be used as a regular disk array and mainly as cache. On its side, Gear6 is specialized in NAS (NFS), Web and SQL caching. Here Violin is getting a technology it had only for SAN. There was a recent agreement with FalconStor for a 4TB SSD appliance to accelerate SAN performance for mission-critical applications.

The two start-ups do not compete and are complementary. On its side, Gear6 was working with pure SSD maker Fusion-io to integrate flash memory with its software. It was also partnering with Fusion-io and HP to build scalable computing platforms. Now the Gear6 technology could be implemented on extremely fast SSD arrays rather than on SSDs only.

Founded in 2002 as Engeneered Intelligence, Gear6 raised over $24.5 million in venture capital including $10 million in 2006, $10 million in 2006 and at least $4 million in 2009.

We don't think that Violin paid more than this total to get Gear6, a company with only 30 customers in eight years of activity. They include Answers.com, Blue Box Group, Bowker, Glam Media, Jigsaw, MyYearbook.com, Quepasa, Travis Software and Veoh. The SSD array company is well financed but couldn't offer more that what it got from investors since its inception, a little more than $30 million.