Red Hat now a leading provider of open hybrid cloud technologies

Red Hat, one of the world's leading provider of open source solutions is in the process of being acquired by IBM for a massive $34 billion. But that deal is not closed yet and so is still running independently and making its own acquisitions. Red Hat has acquired Tel Aviv-based NooBaa, an early stage company developing software for managing data storage services across hybrid and multicloud environments. NooBaa’s technology makes it a good fit for Red Hat, which has recently emphasized its ability to help enterprises more effectively manage their hybrid and multicloud deployments. At its core, NooBaa is all about bringing together various data silos, which should make it a good fit in Red Hat’s portfolio. With OpenShift and the OpenShift Container Platform, as well as its Ceph Storage service, Red Hat already offers a range of hybrid cloud tools.The addition of NooBaa's data management technology augments Red Hat's existing portfolio of hybrid cloud offerings and helps advance Red Hat's position as a leading provider of open hybrid cloud technologies.

As per Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager, Storage and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Red Hat,  “Data portability is a key imperative for organizations building and deploying cloud-native applications across private and multiple clouds. NooBaa’s technologies will augment our portfolio and strengthen our ability to meet the needs of developers in today’s hybrid and multicloud world. We are thrilled to welcome a technical team of nine to the Red Hat family as we work together to further solidify Red Hat as a leading provider of open hybrid cloud technologies.”

While virtually all of Red Hat’s technology is open source, NooBaa’s code is not. The company says that it plans to open source NooBaa’s technology in due time, though the exact timeline is yet to be determined.

NooBaa was founded in 2013. The company has raised some venture funding from the likes of Jerusalem Venture Partners and OurCrowd with a strategic investment from Akamai Capital thrown in for good measure. The company never disclosed the size of that round, though, and neither Red Hat nor NooBaa are disclosing the financial terms of the acquisition.

NooBaa's technologies address the need for greater visibility and control over unstructured data spread throughout these distributed environments. To achieve this, the company developed a data platform designed to serve as an abstraction layer over existing storage infrastructure. This abstraction not only enables data portability from one cloud to another, but allows users to manage data stored in multiple locations as a single, coherent data set that an application can interact with.

NooBaa's acquisition is vindicated to enhance Red Hat's portfolio of hybrid cloud technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage. Together, these technologies are designed to provide users with a set of powerful, consistent and cohesive capabilities for managing application, compute, storage and data resources across public and private infrastructures.