Red Hat, a software and services company built around a free, open-source operating system, has announced its intention to purchase of Gluster, Inc., a software and services company built around a free and open-source storage system. The move will position Red Hat to offer the necessary combination of software to allow enterprise customers to build out public or private storage clouds.
Red Hat, a software and services company built around a free, open-source operating system, has announced its intention to purchase of Gluster, Inc., a software and services company built around a free and open-source storage system. The move will position Red Hat to offer the necessary combination of software to allow enterprise customers to build out public or private storage clouds.
Gluster, which will continue to operate under its own name, built its business around GlusterFS, a distributed high-availability software-only file system that allows resources from various computing and storage devices to be pooled into a single, centrally-managed namespace. A Gluster storage pool presents itself to client as a standard POSIX device and supports NFS, CIFS, HTTP, FTP as well as the Gluster protocol. A unique feature of the software is that it doesn’t require a metadata server to coordinate I/O. Rather, GlusterFS uses an elastic hash algorithm that allows any node in the pool to locate data anywhere in the cluster.
The deal will cost Red Hat $136 million in cash as well as the assumption of Gluster’s debt. It’s expected to close later this month.
