Red Hat Inc. is bolstering its storage product portfolio with the acquisition of Permabit Technology Corp.’s technology assets, the enterprise Linux provider revealed Monday.

The agreement will also see 16 of Permabit’s employees join Red Hat. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded back in 2000 with a total of $12 million in venture capital funding behind it, Permabit has over the years managed to carve out a niche for itself as a specialist in what it calls “data efficiency technology.” More specifically, it offers products that allow companies to clean up their corporate data so they can access it faster and store it more efficiently. It also sells data compression technology. In addition, the company has partnered with Red Hat since 2016 to ensure its software works with the latter’s storage products.

In a statement, Red Hat said the addition of Permabit’s data deduplication and compression technologies should be a good fit for its own storage offerings. “With the addition of Permabit’s data deduplication and compression tools to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat will be ready to support these organizations as they seek to derive a more efficient storage footprint,” said Jim Totton, a Red Hat vice president and general manager.

The acquisition should at least make Red Hat’s storage products more attractive. Data storage is cheap but it still comes at a cost, and those costs do add up for companies transitioning to more expensive but better-performing flash storage. This same logic was also said to be the motivation behind EMC Corp.’s $2.4 billion acquisition of Data Domain Corp., another company that cleans data, back in 2009.

Red Hat said the deal will “have no material impact” on its second-quarter or fiscal-year earnings.

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