Red Hat to acquire Gluster for $136 mn

RALEIGH, USA: Red Hat announced the acquisition of Gluster Inc., a provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for unstructured data management, for approximately $136 million.

With this acquisition, Red Hat can help enterprise IT to manage big data, whether deployed on-premise or spanning into the public cloud, says the company in a release.

"The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future," said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering, Red Hat. "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."

The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions.

"With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, 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," he added.

Founded in 2005, Gluster's solutions, including GlusterFS, simplifies storage using open source software and commodity hardware.

"We are extremely pleased to be joining Red Hat," said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. "We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community. Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat."

"Industry analysts estimate the total addressable market for unstructured data storage at approximately $4 billion and growing. This is an exciting new area of potential growth for Red Hat and one in which we intend to invest aggressively," said Charlie Peters, EVP and CFO of Red Hat. "While we expect Red Hat's operating income to continue to grow nicely next year based on revenue growth, we expect that non-GAAP operating margin for fiscal year 2013 could be approximately 150 basis points lower than fiscal 2012 as we make additional investments to help realize Gluster's potential."

"At that level, Red Hat's operating margin will still be among the highest compared to other high-growth software companies when they were at the $1 billion revenue stage," he added. Red Hat expects to offer additional guidance for fiscal year 2013 on its fourth quarter earnings call.