Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has acquired the assets and technology of Permabit Technology Corporation, a provider of software for data deduplication, compression and thin provisioning. With the addition of Permabit's data deduplication and compression capabilities to the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat will be able to better enable enterprise digital transformation through more efficient storage options.

As more enterprises move towards adopting the efficiencies offered by digital technologies like Linux containers and cloud computing, being able to run these services and store the resulting data requires new storage needs outside of what is offered by traditional storage technologies. Storage efficiency is a key piece in addressing these needs, particularly with the emergence of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) which blends storage and compute onto a single x86 server. Enterprise-class, open source solutions can help to address the storage challenges posed by these digitally transformative technologies by using software to increase the amount of storage available to applications without increasing the amount of physical storage.

With Permabit's technology, Red Hat can now bring powerful data deduplication and compression features into Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, which will also enhance capabilities across Red Hat's hybrid cloud and storage technologies, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Storage. Consistent with its commitment to delivering fully open source solutions and upstream-first innovation, Red Hat plans to open source Permabit's technology. This will enable customers to use a single, supported and fully-open platform to drive storage efficiency, without having to rely on heterogeneous tools or customized and poorly-supported operating systems.

The transaction is expected to have no material impact to Red Hat's guidance for its second fiscal quarter ending Aug. 31, 2017, or fiscal year ending Feb. 28, 2018.

"Digitally-transformative technologies, including cloud infrastructure, Linux containers and hyper-converged infrastructure, require enterprises to re-examine overlooked or previously commoditized technology decisions, especially storage, to gain as many efficiencies as possible for business evolution. With the addition of Permabit's data deduplication and compression tools to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat will be ready to support these organizations as they seek to derive a more efficient storage footprint to power business innovation." -- Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Red Hat