Red Hat to acquire Inktank

As per the latest update, the company has an agreement to acquire Inktank. Inktank's flagship technology, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, delivers world-class object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds.

Founded in 2012, Inktank's main objective has been to drive the widespread adoption of Ceph, a scalable, open source, software-defined storage system that runs on commodity hardware. Ceph was developed by Inktank's founder and chief technology officer, Sage Weil, and is a replacement for legacy storage systems and provides a unified solution for cloud computing environments. Inktank's primary goal has been to help customers scale their storage to the exabyte-level and beyond in a cost-effective way.

Brian Stevens, Executive Vice-President & CTO, Red Hat, said, "We are thrilled to welcome Inktank to the Red Hat family. They have built an incredibly vibrant community that will continue to be nurtured as we work together to make open the de facto choice for software-defined storage. Inktank has done a brilliant job assembling a strong ecosystem around Ceph and we look forward to expanding on this success together. The strength of these world-class open storage technologies will offer compelling capability as customers move to software-based scale-out storage systems."

As part of the transaction, Red Hat will assume unvested Inktank equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives. The transaction is expected to close in May 2014, subject to customary closing conditions.