Red Hat is acquiring privately owned storage vendor Gluster for approximately US$136 million in cash to boost its cloud offerings, it said on Tuesday.

The combination of cloud computing and the explosion of unstructured data are forcing enterprises to find new ways to handle storage demands, and the acquisition of Gluster will allow Red Hat to address these challenges, according to Red Hat.

Gluster's software-only storage system lets enterprises combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a centrally managed and globally accessible storage pool, Red Hat said. Gluster's software also allows enterprises to move storage on to a public or a private cloud, or a mixture of the two, which are called hybrid cloud environments, according to its own website.

GlusterFS, an open-source and distributed file system, is at the core of the company's storage products. It is capable of scaling to several petabytes of data, and clusters storage building blocks over Infiniband RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) or a TCP/IP interconnect.

In the coming months, Red Hat plans to incorporate Gluster's products into its own and offer them using a subscription model, it said. Red Hat's message to the Gluster community is that the company is committed to the file system's ongoing open development, CTO Brian Stevens wrote in a message.

Gluster was founded in 2005 and is based in Sunnyvale, California. Its current list of customers include Deutsche Bank, Samsung, Autodesk, BAE Systems and Barnes & Noble.

The transaction is expected to close in October, and is subject to the usual closing conditions.

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