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, e-mail, 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, and offers a mix of commodity hardware and open source software, namely GlusterFS, which “allows enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool.” Gluster’s customers include Pandora, Box.net, and Samsung.

Red Hat seems to be acquiring Gluster both for its technology and the company’s talent. “We are extremely pleased to be joining Red Hat,” Gluster cofounder and CTO AB Periasamy said in the announcement. “Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.”