Red Hat, Inc. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a provider of open source unstructured data storage solutions, for approximately $136 million in cash. With this acquisition, Red Hat says it will improve how enterprise IT manages the explosion of big data, whether on-premise or spanning into the public cloud; and expand into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, delivering open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.
"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," says Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering at Red Hat. "With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90's paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical."
Gluster was founded in 2005 to help companies simplify storage using open source software and commodity hardware. The heart of Gluster is GlusterFS, a software-only, scale-out storage system. It enables enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool. By combining commodity economics with a scale-out approach, customers can deploy abundant storage without compromising on cost, performance and manageability. Gluster has emerged as an innovative open source leader, relied upon by companies such as Pandora, Box.net and Samsung to efficiently manage large volumes of data.
As part of the transaction, Red Hat will also assume unvested Gluster equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives. The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions.
"Industry analysts estimate the total addressable market for unstructured data storage at approximately $4 billion and growing. This is an exciting new area of potential growth for Red Hat and one in which we intend to invest aggressively," says Charlie Peters, EVP and CFO of Red Hat.
For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com/.
For more information about Gluster, go to www.gluster.com.