Sunnyvale, CA, March 27, 2012 - GridIron® Systems, a pioneer in Big Data acceleration, today announced its TurboCharger™ SAN acceleration appliance has been certified as interoperable with NetApp® unified storage solutions. Customers running high performance databases for applications such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Decision Support Systems (DSS) now have a proven, cost-effective option for accelerating application performance and supporting more concurrent users and applications. Rigorous lab testing and customer deployments have proven that installing the TurboCharger accelerator in front of NetApp enterprise storage arrays can deliver immediate performance gains, minimize disruption to operations, and reduce complexity.

The GridIron TurboCharger is a SAN-attached appliance that is installed into the storage network between servers and storage without any disruption to provide a high-performance access layer to the storage infrastructure. It significantly boosts the performance of applications and databases with no changes to existing servers, storage, applications or processes. The TurboCharger uses Set-Ranking™ analytics to continuously profile the data access behavior of applications in order to identify performance-impacting data at any given time. Using proprietary hardware, it moves this important data, in real time, to high-performance DRAM and Flash on the appliance to deliver the data to applications up to 100X faster.

NetApp and GridIron have published a technical report titled "Increase Application Performance by Using NetApp Storage Controllers and GridIron TurboCharger Data Accelerator Appliance" that describes the benefits of using a GridIron TurboCharger with NetApp unified storage systems, based on its evaluation of performance and stability in OLTP and DSS workloads on an Oracle® 11gR2 database. As a result of the evaluation, NetApp found that installing TurboCharger was simple and straightforward, and preserved the high availability configuration of the environment. By comparing the test environment with and without TurboCharger, NetApp verified that installing TurboCharger allowed twice as many users to access the OLTP database concurrently while maintaining database response times. In DSS testing, TurboCharger reduced query completion time by 50%. The storage system read load was reduced by 99%, enabling the storage controller to handle additional load from applications/users.

NetApp offers a range of high performance enterprise storage systems that utilize Flash to reduce response times. Adding TurboCharger in front of the storage controller complements those solutions by offloading Input/Output operations, extending the scale-up range of the system. The NetApp-GridIron combination creates a very affordable solution alternative for database users who require high performance to process queries faster and support concurrent users. This collaboration helps customers analyze extremely large, data-intensive workloads with boundless and secure storage for better decision-making and business advantage.

The NetApp technical report is available online at solutionconnection.netapp.com/gridiron-systems-high-performance-database-solutions.aspx

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 and blog: www.bigdatafasttracked.com.

Press Contact:
GridIron Systems, Inc.
Agnes Lamont, Marketingsage
Ph: (925) 426-0488 X112
E-Mail: gridiron-pr@marketingsage.net

GridIron, TurboCharger and Set-Ranking are registered or claimed trademarks of GridIron Systems, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.

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