Red Hat is spending $136 million to acquire Gluster, a storage company that builds management tools for controlling the growth of unstructured data both in customers’ own data centers and in cloud services. Red Hat, which is on track to become the first open source company with $1 billion in annual revenue, already offers software for building internal clouds as well as a public platform-as-a-service cloud called OpenShift. The Gluster acquisition, announced yesterday and expected to close later this month, will help fill out the holes in Red Hat’s storage management portfolio.
“Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two,” Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said in a press release, referring to so-called hybrid clouds that combine internal and external computing resources. “With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90s p