Red Hat buys Gluster

Open source software provider, Red Hat on Tuesday bought online data storage firm, Gluster for $136 million in cash to expand its Internet-based computing, reports Proactive Investors.

Red Hat's third-quarter and full-year fiscal 2012 earnings forecast will not be impacted by the acquisition of Gluster, it said.

The deal is expected to close this month, subject to customary conditions. Gluster, founded in 2005 by Anand Babu Periasamy and Hitesh Chellani, sells open source storage solutions to customers such as UK defence major BAE Systems, Stanford University, Deutsche Bank and the administrative office of US courts, says The Economic Times.

Gluster, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, has developed an open source storage platform technology for working with large amounts of data (terabytes, all the way up to petabytes) that ties together everything from the operating system layer to the file system and management interface.

Gluster gives Red Hat an opportunity to expand a $4 billion market for storage of so-called unstructured data such as e-mails and social media postings. The deal also helps Red Hat, the largest seller of Linux software, offer more solutions to customers who want to access data over the Internet using cloud computing, according to Bloomberg.

“This is an exciting new area of potential growth for Red Hat, and one in which we intend to invest aggressively,” said Charlie Peters, Red Hat's CFO, in a statement.