Red Hat Inc. today announced that it has picked up Boston-based data management startup NooBaa Inc. to boost its strategically important hybrid cloud portfolio.

The deal comes as the company itself is being acquired by IBM Corp. in a $34 million acquisition expected to complete next year. Red Hat’s strong position in the hybrid cloud market is one of the main reasons IBM is pursuing the deal.

The NooBaa purchase, while small, could give the company a big boost on this front. The startup offers a software platform that aims to make companies’ information more portable. Portability is an essential element of hybrid cloud environments, particularly for the rapidly growing segment of enterprises currently adopting software containers.

Companies are using containers to build portable applications that can be easily moved between cloud platforms, but bringing those applications’ data along is a complicated task. That’s because the way data is stored can vary greatly between clouds. Migrating workloads from one platform to another often requires heavily modifying them to use the new environment’s storage service, which comes with several challenges.

As Red Hat Storage vice president Ranga Rangachar explained, “once written to a storage system it can become hard to move [data] without disrupting applications or end-users, even if it makes economic sense for it to be moved to another location. Second, it tends to proliferate, making it harder to know what data is being generated and where it is being stored.”

NooBaa’s software provides a unified storage access layer that works with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud, as well Red Hat’s own Ceph Storage solution for on-premises data centers. Hybrid cloud applications can send all their requests via NooBaa instead of having to separately interact with each service.

The result, according to NooBaa, is a lot less work for developers. Moving workloads between clouds becomes easier because a service can keep using the startup’s software to access resources after it’s moved to the new environment.

Red Hat plans to integrate the platform with its Ceph Storage and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage offerings. In a FAQ guide released for the deal, the company also hinted that it may eventually open-source NooBaa’s software.

“Red Hat has long shown its commitment to open-sourcing the technology it acquires, and we have no reason to expect a change in this approach,” the company wrote. “Our specific plans and timeline will be determined over the coming months.”

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Photo: Leonid Mamchenkov/Flickr