Red Hat, InkTank acquisition announced
Open source solutions provider Red Hat recently announced that it would acquire InkTank. Red Hat will be acquiring InkTank in a $175 million cash deal, TechCrunch reported.
InkTank is the provider of Ceph, an open source software-defined storage system. With Ceph, Red Hat is seeking to become the largest provider of this type of service. Red Hat's acquisition strategy is to take InkTank's main product and combine it with one of its existing storage products to become a stronger competitor in the cloud services market.
"The strength of these world-class open storage technologies will offer compelling capability as customers move to software-based scale-out storage systems," said Brian Stevens, executive vice president and CTO of Red Hat, in a press release.
Red Hat will be using InkTank's capabilities to combine with its GlusterFS-based storage. The company acquired Gluster in 2011 as part of a strategy to expand its cloud computing offerings. InkTank will benefit from the acquisition because it will allow it to continue growing its product offering as it is integrated with Red Hat, TechCrunch noted.
"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," said InkTank founder and CTO in a press release.
The acquisition of InkTank marks the ninth acquisition for Red Hat. Through this acquisition, the company looks to position itself to continue taking on other competitors in the cloud market, including Amazon Web Services. As the cloud computing services market continues to grow, there is a battle for domination in the cloud business. Google and Amazon are two well-known major players in the market.