Red Hat acquires Gluster for $136m to manage big data in the cloud

Red Hat is preparing to buy Gluster, a developer of scale-out software storage platforms, in a move designed to bolster the company's capabilities in managing large volumes of data, especially in cloud-based environments.

The acquisition, set to close later this month, will cost Red Hat $136m, which the company said would put it in a strong position to target the growing market for unstructured data management, estimated to be worth about $4bn.

"The explosion of big data and cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to rethink storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future," said Red Hat chief technology officer Brian Stevens.

With the Gluster acquisition, Red Hat said it will seek to redefine how enterprises manage growing 'big data' storage issues around email, audio, video and documents, whether for on-premise purposes or spanning into the public cloud.

Gluster's product line is based around GlusterFS, a highly scalable file system that can be distributed across large volumes of commodity hardware and can pull it all together into a high-performance storage pool.

Gluster boasts several notable customers including Pandora, Box.net and Samsung all of which use its services to manage large volumes of data.