GridIron Systems Joins NetApp Alliance Partner Program

GridIron Systems, Inc., in big data acceleration, announced its membership in the NetApp Alliance Partner Program.

GridIron is collaborating with NetApp, Inc. to integrate its TurboCharger SAN acceleration appliance into NetApp unified storage environments. This collaboration will enable customers to increase application performance and support more concurrent users and applications without disrupting operations, while preserving limited budget dollars. Customers can analyze large, data-intensive workloads with boundless and secure storage for better decision-making.

The GridIron TurboCharger is a SAN-attached appliance that provides a transparent access layer between servers and storage to boost the performance of applications and databases with no changes to existing servers, storage, applications or processes. By bridging the I/O gap between servers and storage, the TurboCharger delivers solid-state performance from existing storage and satisfies the concurrent bandwidth and IOPS requirements of demanding applications. By combining TurboCharger with NetApp unified storage systems, customers can leverage their current multi-protocol, multi-vendor storage investments by improving performance and simplifying the management of multi-vendor disk arrays to obtain storage efficiency, data protection, and data management features.

"IT organizations are struggling to meet the storage challenges of rapidly changing workloads, large active datasets, increasing number of concurrent users and applications," said Prasad Pammidimukkala, Vice President of Marketing at GridIron Systems. "Storage solutions must be flexible and adaptive because customers can no longer afford the cost, complexity or downtime associated with forklift upgrades. Both NetApp and GridIron deliver solutions that enhance storage without disruption to operations. In fact TurboCharger is the only solution that speeds up access to big data with zero changes to server, storage, application software or operational practices."

High Moon Studios uses NetApp FAS3270 system in conjunction with GridIron Systems’ TurboCharger in its virtualized, shared storage infrastructure. The company, which is part of Activision Blizzard, makes action-packed games such as the upcoming Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, due out in fall 2012.

"We have been able to reduce our software build times by up to nine times and remain very competitive thanks to our storage efficiency," said Dan Mulkiewicz, Director of IT at High Moon Studios. "TurboCharger really is a plug and play solution that works seamlessly alongside NetApp. We have improved all of our performance metrics dramatically and avoided spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary upgrades."