Red Hat has announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inktank, provider of scale-out, open source storage systems. Inktank’s flagship technology, Ceph Enterprise, provides object and block storage software to enterprises looking to deploy public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. The combination of Red Hat's existing GlusterFS-based storage offering and the newly acquired Inktank positions Red Hat as a leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.
Red Hat has announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inktank, provider of scale-out, open source storage systems. Inktank’s flagship technology, Ceph Enterprise, provides object and block storage software to enterprises looking to deploy public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. The combination of Red Hat's existing GlusterFS-based storage offering and the newly acquired Inktank positions Red Hat as a leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.
Inktank's main purpose has been to drive the widespread adoption of Ceph, which is a scalable, open source, software-defined storage system that runs on commodity hardware. Inktank's founder and chief technology officer, Sage Weil, created Ceph as a replacement for legacy storage systems, providing a unified solution for cloud computing environments. Inktank's goal has also been to help customers scale their storage to the exabyte-level (and further), all in a cost-effective way.
In terms of the transaction itself, Red Hat acquired Inktank for roughly $175 million in cash, subject to certain adjustments at closing. Part of the deal includes Red Hat assuming unvested Inktank equity that is outstanding on the closing date as well as certain equity retention incentives. The transaction is slated to finalize in sometime in May 2014, subject to customary closing conditions.
Red Hat has indicated that it does not anticipate the transaction to have a material effect on its financial performance for the first quarter of its fiscal year, which ends on February 28, 2015. Red Hat has also reaffirmed that its fiscal 2015 guidance, provided on its March 27, 2014 earnings call, for revenue, non-GAAP operating margin, non-GAAP earnings per share and operating cash flow. Additionally, non-GAAP operating margin and EPS estimates do not include the impact of stock-based compensation and amortization of acquisition-related intangibles.
