GridIron Emerged From Stealth

GridIron Systems, Inc. emerged from stealth mode and announced the general availability of its TurboCharger data acceleration appliance, customer installations in eight industries, a portfolio of resale partners and new funding for its expansion efforts.

GridIron’s focus is on transparently solving performance and scalability problems associated with handling big data – as typically encountered in multi-terabyte databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, and large virtualized/consolidated installations.

Big data has traditionally meant big problems with access speeds and big investments in redoing data center infrastructure. GridIron’s TurboCharger appliance is a solution that speeds up access to big data with zero changes to server, storage, application software or operational practices.

Installed transparently in the storage network between servers and storage, TurboCharger uses patent-pending Set-Ranking technology (with unique silicon and software analytics) to speed up existing storage performance by up to 100 times. This enables applications to run up to 10 times faster.

Other approaches, such as server flash cards or fork-lift upgrades to storage arrays, require application downtime, code changes or constant manual tending of hot data. In contrast, an IT department using GridIron’s TurboCharger gets the benefits of solid-state performance in under an hour without disrupting applications.

"TurboCharger uses GridIron’s proprietary Set-Ranking technology and leverages the speed of solid state memory in a really smart way to address the growing requirement for effective big data environments," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "With the TurboCharger, GridIron has figured out how to identify exactly what data will be needed to match the throughput capabilities of the CPU and memory so that it can be staged to DRAM or Flash in the appliance and thus eliminate most or all of the I/O gap caused by traditional storage bottlenecks. While it is ultra high performance, it also provides two good ‘lows’ – cost and disruption – that will help it be attractive to database and virtualized environments."

Shopzilla, Inc., an online price comparison service, deployed GridIron TurboCharger to accelerate a 40 terabyte (and growing) five-node Oracle RAC 10g data warehouse and realized an order of magnitude improvement in performance and query capacity without any changes to existing database environment.

The University of California, Davis recognizes the deployment benefits and power of the GridIron data acceleration appliance. "GridIron’s TurboCharger helped the university improve the peak Oracle read performance in a VMware virtualized environment by up to 30X, reduced data center costs by over $400,000, and extended the life of our existing storage infrastructure," said Dave Zavatson, data center manager at University of California, Davis. "TurboCharger did not require any changes to server, storage, or application configurations and proved fully compatible with the EMC storage, Brocade FC fabric, Dell and Sun Sparc servers."

Other customers in the retail, financial services, education, research, health care, media, telecommunications, and government sectors have deployed GridIron’s TurboCharger to solve big data access problems. Customers have boosted application performance and have saved millions of dollars in their production SAN environments. TurboCharger is working alongside multi-vendor environments including vendors such as EMC, NetApp, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, VMware, Brocade, Dell, Oracle, and Microsoft.

GridIron also announced a round of investment from Mohr Davidow, Foundation Capital, and Trinity Ventures to be used for the next stage of growth for the company’s operations.

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