According to new AllThingsD report published on Friday, Mountain View, Calif.-based Violin Memory is acquiring its data center rival GridIron Systems, which was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.

As per AllThingsD's unidentified `inside' sources, the announcement about the acquisition of GridIron by Violin Memory - which manufactures enterprise-level storage arrays - will likely be announced on Monday, January 21.

Though there has been no official disclosure about the financial terms of the Violin-GridIron deal, AllThingsD has estimated that Violin Memory seemingly paid an amount of between $200 million and $300 million for acquiring GridIron.

Since GridIron chiefly helps "organizations remove performance bottlenecks in their data centers," the acquisition of the company by Violin Memory will apparently pave the way for an integration of GridIron's data center acceleration appliances with Violin Memory's solutions around virtualization and mission-critical apps.

As a part of the acquisition deal, 20 employees of GridIron will be joining the 450-stron staff Violin Memory. In addition, noting that Violin Memory will also take over GridIron's building and - more significantly - its technology for combining it with its own storage systems, Violin Memory's CEO Don Basile: "We have the combination of the hardware and software."