Interesting news from the storage world – Linux giant Red Hat bought storage software provider Gluster…

Yesterday Red Hat announced the acquisition of Gluster, a Sunnyvale-based provider of open source solutions for storing and managing unstructured data in the enterprise, for $136mn in cash.

The company was founded in 2005 and has over 150 customers. The transaction is expected to close in October. Gluster offers GlusterFS software that enables enterprises to pool commodity storage and compute resources and manage them centrally. GlusterFS allows both capacity and performance to scale on demand, from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes, using both on-premise commodity hardware and public cloud storage blocks. Gluster’s notable customers include Pandora, Box.net, and Samsung.

This looks like it could either 1) be bundled with Red Hat for enterprises so that installations can take advantage of pooled storage, or 2) be a move by Red Hat to get into the cloud storage space (presumably with custom solutions for Red Hat installs). Which do you think it is?

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Categories: General