Red Hat further clarifies their intentions behind its acquisition of open storage management firm Gluster with the launch of the Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, a big data file system based on open-source technology.

The offering, based on the GlusterFS 3.2 platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, is designed for companies that analyze large datasets in variety of different formats. It can scale to several petabytes and lets admins manage physical storage as a virtualized and highly scalable resource pool.

“These are exciting times for Red Hat and our ability to provide our first innovative storage offering to current and prospective customers,” said Ranga Rangachari, general manager, Storage at Red Hat. “We expect this announcement to be one of many that will enable organizations to reduce their storage costs while addressing the massive growth in unstructured data.”

There have been speculations that Red Hat acquired Gluster because of its position in the OpenStack community, but the deal clearly extended beyond that.  Nevertheless, the Linux distributor is looking towards the cloud as well with plans to make more acquisitions in the future, as well as a number of recent product initiatives.

Last month Red Hat overhauled its OpenShaft PaaS service by adding a web-based IDE (or build-as-a-service) element to the mix.  The platform now features integration with the open-source Jenkins QA tool and the Apache Maven software dependency checker. The most important addition however is Red Hat’s JBoss Tools integrated development.

The company made yet another appeal to developers in November when it opened up its Ceylon programming language and SDK.  The Ceylon git repositories and an early version of a dedicated integrated development environments based on the open-source Eclipse has been made available via the ceylon-lang.org website.