Gridiron Systems Joins the NetApp Alliance Partner Program


Membership Provides Customers with Non-disruptive, High Performance Boost for Big Data Analysis

Sunnyvale, CA - GridIron® Systems, a pioneer in Big Data acceleration, today announced its membership in the NetApp Alliance Partner Program. GridIron is collaborating with NetApp to integrate its TurboCharger(TM) 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 extremely large, data-intensive workloads with boundless and secure storage for better decision-making and business advantage.

The GridIron TurboCharger is a SAN-attached appliance that provides a high-performance, transparent access layer between servers and storage to significantly 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 advanced 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 (Nasdaq: ATVI), makes action-packed games such as the upcoming Transformers(TM): 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."

About the NetApp Alliance Partner Program

The NetApp Alliance Partner Program provides qualified infrastructure and application providers with access to NetApp solutions, software development kits, technical support, training, certification, product information, and marketing and sales assistance. Customers benefit by having access to best-of-breed partner solutions that are tested to work with NetApp storage. Additional information on the NetApp Alliance Partner Program is available at http://www.netapp.com/alliances.

About GridIron Systems

GridIron Systems is a Big Data Acceleration company based in Sunnyvale, California. Formed by a team of networking, storage and SAN innovators, it has focused on bringing the benefits of new technologies like solid state disk to improve data center performance and costs with the LEAST amount of operational disruption. GridIron has 24 patents pending in areas related to big data storage, access-behavior analysis and management. GridIron offers the most comprehensive solutions to speed up multi-terabyte databases including clustered and virtualized environments at a fraction of the cost of alternatives. Additional information is available at www.gridironsystems.com. Follow GridIron on Twitter: @gridironsystems.

Agnes Lamont

Partner, Marketingsage LLC

Phone: 925-426-0488 ext. 112

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