Start-Up’s Profile: GridIron Systems

Company
GridIron Systems, Inc.

Headquarters
Sunnyvale, CA

Year founded
2007

Financial funding
$20 million in 2009 by VCs including Foundation Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Trinity Ventures

Main executives

• David Wright, president and CEO: most recently chairman and CEO of Verari Systems; formerly president, CEO and chairman of Legato (acquired by by EMC) and then EVP, office of the CEO, Strategic Alliances and Global Accounts, at EMC; before joining Legato, president and CEO at Amdahl after a variety of staff and management positions at IBM.
• Som Sikdar, co-founder and CTO: founder of Shomiti Systems (Finisar)
• Herb Schneider, co-founder and VP engineering: founder and VP engineering at Extreme Networks, formerly at Network Peripherals (FalconStor) and National Semiconductor
• Prasad Pammidimukkala VP marketing: at Nishan and McData
• Gerald Conboy, director of sales and channels: VP of WW IBM OEM sales at NetApp
• Diptish Datta, director of WW support: managed the launch of a new Support CRM system at Data Domain

Product
TurboCharger is a SAN accelerator appliance that speeds up application performance "up to 10x", said the company, without any changes to existing servers, storage or applications. It attaches to a SAN switch and is transparent to servers and storage arrays by acting as a FC proxy. GridIron aimed the product at Oracle database, and also at filers. NAS clients will get better performance regardless of protocol because NFS, CIFS, HTTP, and even iSCSI are accelerated when the back-end FC storage has been speeded up by TurboCharger that leverages Flash, DRAM, proprietary hardware, and software to accelerate storage.