For $175 million, Red Hat to Acquire Inktank

Red Hat, Inc. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inktank Storage, Inc., provider of scale-out, open source storage systems.

Inktank Ceph Enterprise delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. Combined with Red Hat’s existing GlusterFS-based storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.

In a recently-published assessment of the software-defined storage market, IDC’s Ashish Nadkarni, the firm’s research director for storage systems wrote: “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.”

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 CTO, 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. It has provided customers with expertise, processes, tools and support with their enterprise subscription and service offerings.

Inktank’s customers include Cisco, CERN and Deutsche Telekom, and its partners include Alcatel-Lucent and Dell. The company has offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA.

Red Hat has agreed to acquire Inktank, a privately-held company, for approximately $175 million in cash, subject to certain adjustments at closing.

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.

Red Hat does not anticipate that the transaction will have a material effect on its financial performance for the first quarter of its fiscal year ending February 28, 2015. It is also reaffirming 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. Non-GAAP operating margin and EPS estimates exclude the impact of stock-based compensation and amortization of acquisition-related intangibles.

Sage Weil, founder and CTO, Inktank, said: “With a shared commitment to open source, open standards and customer success, joining forces with Red Hat is something we are all very excited about. We believe our open storage technologies will be critical in the management of data in the coming era of cloud computing. 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.”

Brian Stevens, EVP and CTO, Red Hat, said: “We’re 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.”