Red Hat buys Gluster in $136M deal

Red Hat has announced that it will be acquiring Gluster, an open source storage vendor that specializes in the management of unstructured data, to define a new "baseline" for how enterprises manage the explosion of big data.

According to the company's press release issued on Tuesday, the investment represents an expansion into a "critical part" of enterprise infrastructure, enabling the vendor to deliver open source storage offerings that is aimed at protecting customer investments as they approach the "new era of computing".

The deal is worth US$136 million in cash and would not affect Red Hat's third quarter and full-year fiscal 2012 earnings forecast, it added.

Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering at Red Hat, said of the deal: "The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to rethink storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future.

"Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging...the two."

Gluster, founded in 2005, promises to help address these storage concerns as its GlusterFS product allows enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performace, centrally managed, globally accessible storage pool, the press release stated.

"The scale-out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds," noted Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group, in a media statement.