Violin Memory announced today that it has acquired the assets of Gear6, which specializes in caching software. Violin plans to add the scalable caching software to its line of arrays based on solid-state disk (SSD) technology.

Gear6 has two software product lines. The company is known primarily for its Memcached products, such as Web Cache. But Gear6 also has NFS caching software, and that’s the product line that lured Violin Memory, according to CEO Don Basile.

“This acquisition allows us to move into the NAS space,” says Basile. “We can put the NFS caching software into our 3U, 10TB SSD appliances, which allows us to cache large NAS infrastructures. Users can keep their current NAS systems, and we can significantly accelerate the NFS appliances by caching the reads and metadata.”

The Gear6 caching software will run on standard Intel CPUs in Violin Memory’s NAS head appliances.

As with its existing products, Violin will sell the combined solutions primarily through OEMs and VARs.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not announced. Gear6 had raised about $40 million in venture capital.

Most recently, Violin introduced its SSD-based 3200 Memory Array, which is priced in the $/GB ballpark of some RAID arrays with conventional spinning disk drives (see “Violin SSD array hits price parity with HDD arrays”). The company claims performance of 230,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) on sustained writes with 4KB blocks, and 250,000 IOPS per device with a 60/40 read/write ratio. A 140TB configuration could achieve more than three million IOPS.

Image Credit: https://www.mirantis.com/

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