Today Linux distributor Red Hat had a pretty a big announcement. The company acquired Gluster, a provider of open-source storage software for $136 million in cash.  This represents a major expansion for Red Hat, as well as a significant boost to its current portfolio: GlusterFS is already used by a number of major companies including Samsung and Box.net, and it’s also tightly integrated with OpenStack since the release of  Gluster Connector in July.

“Enterprises and service providers have struggled to manage their rapidly expanding unstructured data stores with conventional storage systems,” says Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group. “The scale out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds.”

A definitive agreement to carry out the transaction has already been signed, and the deal is expected to close this month.

This acquisition represents only a part of a broader big data strategy Red Hat has in store.  CEO Jim Whitehurst noted in an August interview that his company plans on acquiring a Hadoop or NoSQL firm in the near future. 10gen, Couchbase and DataStax are some of the companies analysts believe the open-source solutions maker may pursue.

Nevertheless, the Gluster deal in and of itself is a big push forward.  GlusterFS versions 3.3 beta 2 and above feature Hadoop support without the 64MB block and 16 TB volume limits, on top of other features. The company also has a fairly long list of partners, including Savage IO, the most recent team up.  The NAS firm is integrating GlusterFS into its some of its cloud portfolio.