Red Hat has just made public that it had signed a definitive agreement to buy Inktank, a venture-backed startup launched in 2012 by the developers behind the Ceph software-defined storage component of OpenStack to commercialize the project. The transaction is expected to complete in May 2014, subject to customary closing conditions.

The open source stalwart is paying approximately $175 million as part of the deal, its largest since the acquisition of free middlemore maker JBoss in 2006 and the third biggest in the company’s entire 21-year history. That alone speaks to exactly how big of a hole Inktank plugs in Red Hat’s portfolio.

The Linux distributor entered the NAS market two years ago with the purchase of scale-out system maker Gluster for $137 million, however that only bought it the traditional file storage storage capabilities of the firm’s GlusterFS platform, which address but a portion of the use cases it’s been working to bring into the open hybrid cloud fold. That’s where Inktank comes in. The startup’s flagship offering provides the object and block storage functionality of Ceph in an enterprise-friendly subscription package complete with a visual interface and support services; just what Red Hat needs to fill in the missing parts and as, an added bonus, extend its reach farther the OpenStack community.

“As software leads the creation of the next generation of infrastructure, Red Hat is increasing its reach in the ecosystem since open source plays a critical role. Both Ceph (Inktank) and GlusterFS (Gluster) solutions are important data services to create storage solutions including Server SAN (see http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Server_SAN_Market_Definition) and OpenStack clouds.” says Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman. “Red Hat has a strong track record of increasing community participation in projects and delivering value to ecosystem partners and end users.”

Looking at the big picture, the acquisition of Inktank also brings Red Hat a big step closer to  realizing its goal of standardizing hybrid computing on open standards. The vendor said that it intends to combine the startup’s version of Ceph with GlusterFS to provide programmability across object, block and file system storage environments. The objective, as Ranga Rangachari, the head of the vendor’s storage and Big Data group described it to SiliconANGLE in an interview earlier this month, is to “decouple the services that your storage layer can provide from the underlying hardware.”

That way, he explained, “the intelligence elevates to the software level. The ultimate goal is you should be able to take industry-standard commodity x86 servers and layer your software solution on top and just have the entire gamma of services that you’re used to. The only difference is that, for the customer, it gives them complete flexibility and freedom of choice.”

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