Violin Memory, the flash storage house reportedly looking to go public this year, has bought GridIron Systems, a start-up whose software accelerates enterprise applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehouses, virtualization and Big Data analytics.

GridIron sells a box called TurboCharger that's supposed to make applications two-10 times faster.

Violin isn't saying what it paid but the price is rumored to be between $200 million and $300 million.

GridIron raised about $30 million in VC funding from Mohr Davidow, Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures.

Violin says GridIron brings its arrays complementary application acceleration and SAN-based caching technologies.

According to Violin CEO Don Basile "The expanded talent, technology and intellectual property position Violin Memory at the forefront of the ongoing transformation of enterprise data centers to memory-based architectures."

GridIron CTO Som Sikdar said, "GridIron's patented algorithms enable dramatic application acceleration in data center SAN environments by non-intrusively learning about input/output (I/O) access patterns and caching an application's active dataset. By combining GridIron intellectual property and Violin Memory Array technologies, we can deliver solutions that will allow companies to transform the way they deploy and manage applications in their data center."

GridIron System's business, engineering and operations units have already been integrated with Violin Memory. It's getting about 20 GridIron people