Violin Memory‘s acquisition of GridIron Systems is all about speeding up applications in data centers.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Violin creates Flash memory storage systems that get around the bottlenecks of slower hard drives in data center servers. GridIron creates applications that accelerate the performance of enterprise applications running on servers. It can speed up online transaction processing, data warehouses, virtualization, and “big data” analytics. As such, the companies complement one another.

“The acquisition of GridIron Systems complements and expands Violin Memory’s strategy of offering memory-based solutions that accelerate business critical applications while optimizing IT infrastructures,” said Don Basile, the chief executive of Violin Memory.

Violin’s main rival is EMC.

GridIron focuses on storage area network caches, where it speeds up the performance of applications running on Violin’s Flash memory arrays. It does so by analyzing input-output access patterns and caching the active data for an application, said Som Sikdar, GridIron’s founder and chief technology officer.

Violin’s storage systems have as many as 3,000 Flash memory chips in a one enclosure, and its software enables a data center operator to manage it as a single storage element, said Ashish Gupta, the director of product marketing at Violin, in an interview with VentureBeat. Violin buys its chips from Toshiba and applies its own secret process to them.

Violin Memory was founded in 2005 and has 450 employees. It reportedly filed for an initial public offering. Last year, Violin raised a $50 million fourth round, bringing its total venture capital funding to $172 million. At that time, it was valued at more than $800 million. GridIron has raised about $30 million since its founding in 2007.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Flash storage business Fusion-io has launched its new ioScale product line, which promises to make all-flash-memory data centers a more feasible proposition for companies.

Ideally, ioScale makes the all-flash-drive data center more practical for companies that rely on high-performance hardware. Each one of ioScale’s units provides up 3.2 terabytes of Fusion ioMemory capacity, with prices starting at $3.89 per gigabyte. By offering ioScale to companies who order a minimum of just one hundred units, Fusion-io likely hopes to outgun competitors like SolidFire.

Fusion-io claims ioScale’s big benefits include:

• Up to 3.2 terabytes of capacity on a single half-length PCIe slot, which can enbable scaling to 12.8 terabytes or more and reduce the need for disk drive bays
• Hyperscale servers supporting UEFI
• High level endurance in all capacities
• Compatibility with the Fusion ioMemory SDK

Fusion-io CEO David Flynn wants the ioScale product line to be there for forward-thinking and young businesses that are willing to embrace an all-flash-memory approach for data centers, specifically “hyperscale and cloud companies.”

“By making ioScale available to growing webscale and emerging cloud companies, Fusion-io is at the forefront of the transition to the all-flash hyperscale data center, powered by open-software-defined solutions,” Flynn said in a statement. “Hyperscale companies are an entirely different market with different needs compared to enterprise organizations.”

Salt Lake City-based Fusion-io was founded in 2006.

Data center photo via Supri Suharjoto/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

EMC Corp is in the final stages of buying flash-memory storage company XtremIO for $400 million, a VentureBeat source has confirmed. The deal is the latest sign that the flash storage market is red hot, and it could spur other deals as other big players rush to bolster their own offerings.

Flash storage is big because it’s where all large enterprises are moving to store their massive amounts of data — because of its superior performance and lower price.

The EMC-XtremIO talks were first reported earlier today by the Israel-based tech publication, Globes. Our source said late Monday that the deal is not signed yet, but it is in “final stages of paper.”

XtremeIO is based in Herzliya, Israel, and has offices in San Jose, Calif., and talks have been building since EMC CEO Joseph Tucci went to Israel in December, the Globes reported. The two companies have ties in part because XtremeIO co-founder Shuki Bruck sold his previous company Rainfinity to EMC.

One rival company in this area is Fusion-io, a relatively young, but fast-growing publicly traded company that launched a new flash storage platform just last week. At the DEMO conference (which VentureBeat co-produces), the company announced a software development kit (SDK) to provide software developers with native access to its ioMemory flash platform, a first in the industry. However, Fusion-io is very small (valued at just $2.36 billion) compared to the bigger players in the industry, and may be more acquisition bait than the other way around.

Big competitors, including NetApp, H-P, Dell, IBM, and Hitachi Data Systems may feel pressured to get in the game and look for such companies to acquire, reports Derrick Harris. Indeed, NetApp was reportedly also trying to make a bid for XtremIO.

The all-flash array of the type XtremeIO offers will give EMC faster performance across both virtualized and big data environments, meaning it will also help EMC’s subsidiary VMWare, which focuses on virtualization. “Combined with EMC’s server-side PCI flash product called Project Lightning, which keeps hot data in an SSD cache sitting alongside the processor, that’s one powerful hardware platform for tomorrow’s applications,” Harris reports.

Another target could be Violin Memory, a Silicon Valley startup, that recently raised $4o million in a fourth round of funding at a reported value of $800M. Nimbus Data Systems, Kaminario, Virident, Pure Storage, Tintri, and Nimble Storage are also names being thrown around.

XtremIO has raised $25 million in two rounds from Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and Giza Venture Capital, which each apparently hold 20-30 percent of the startup. Other investors include Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures.