Red Hat is buying Inktank for its Ceph open source distributed storage know-how for $175m
Wed 30 Apr 2014
Leading provider of open source solutions, Red Hat is to buy Inktank, which builds open source distributed storage systems, for $175 million.
The attraction is Inktank’s Ceph technology, a scalable, open source, software-defined storage system that runs on commodity hardware offering object and block storage software to enterprises deploying clouds. RedHat said that when combined with its own GlusterFS-based storage offering, it will “position Red Hat as the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage”.
GigaOm analyst Barb Darrow commented in his column: “I guess the news shouldn’t be a total surprise, given that Inktank added Red Hat support to Ceph a year ago. Still, it may unsettle some OpenStack players who view Red Hat as a possible threat and would like to see its power over the emerging framework limited. This will likely be the a hot topic at the OpenStack Summit which kicks off May 12 in Atlanta.”
Speaking about the sector before the announcement, IDC research director for storage systems Ashish Nadkarni, said: “Software-defined platforms will continue to grow faster than any other market segment in the file- and object-based storage market. This growth will primarily be driven by a rich and diverse set of data-intensive use cases across multiple industries and geographies.”
Inktank was founded in 2012 with the principal objective of driving widespread adoption of Ceph which was developed by its founder and chief technology officer, Sage Weil. He said the companies had a shared commitment to open source, open standards and customer success. “We believe our open storage technologies will be critical in the management of data in the coming era of cloud computing,” he added. “Joining Red Hat will no doubt lead to tremendous innovation that will ultimately serve the industry well and answer the demand for open storage solutions fully integrated with existing and emerging data center architectures such as OpenStack.”
