Red Hat, Inc. the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data.

Red Hat is expanding into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, which should enable it to deliver open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.

"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 at 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. 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."