Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/15/gridiron_bought/
Just who is the mystery gobbler of flash upstart GridIron?
And did they pay $300m for the TurboCharger maker?
Posted in Storage, 15th January 2013 11:05 GMT
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GridIron Systems, a SAN accelerating startup, has been bought by a mystery buyer for an unknown amount.
The company builds the TurboCharger, a DRAM and flash cache box with software to automatically move the most-wanted data from the backing SAN into its cache store. GridIron's TurboCharger is also bundled with NetApp's E-Series E5400 arrays.
NetApp may want a similar supply deal for its fabric-attached storage arrays using its acquired CacheIQ technology as part of its storage clustering MARS project [1].
GridIron's Prasad Pammidimukkala, veep for product management and business development, was asked about the acquisition of GridIron and replied: "I will get back to you shortly - I can't comment at the moment." That's not a "no comment", then.
The news was first revealed by Scality's director of product strategy Philippe Nicolas [2], who speculated that a price of between $200m and $300m was involved.
The likelihood is that GridIron has been swallowed by a mainstream storage vendor looking to compete with all-flash and hybrid flash-hard disk drive SAN arrays. That would mean the list of possible buyers could include Dell, EMC, HDS, HP and NetApp. ®