Red Hat Bolsters Hybrid Cloud Management with NooBaa Buy

As hybrid cloud and multicloud use by businesses grows, Red Hat is moving to broaden its data management services by acquiring NooBaa, a startup that offers software to help businesses manage data across hybrid and multicloud infrastructures.

NooBaa, which was founded in 2013 in Israel, helps companies gain greater visibility and control over their unstructured data through a data platform that serves as an abstraction layer over existing storage infrastructure. The abstraction enables data portability from one cloud to another while also allowing users to manage data stored in multiple locations as a single, coherent data set available to applications.

Those capabilities were a good fit with Red Hat’s existing hybrid-cloud technologies, including its OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage, according to Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager of storage and hyperconverged infrastructure at Red Hat.

Red Hat’s Ranga Rangachari

“Data portability is a key imperative for organizations building and deploying cloud-native applications across private and multiple clouds,” said Rangachari. “NooBaa’s technologies will augment our portfolio and strengthen our ability to meet the needs of developers in today’s hybrid and multicloud world.”

The terms of the acquisition were not made public.

In a FAQ about the deal, Red Hat said NooBaa’s software abstracts the underlying cloud-storage infrastructure and provides a single interface for applications to interact with, along with a range of data services, including tiering, migration or copying data between clouds.

“NooBaa differentiates itself by not being reliant on any single storage environment, something that can be common with data services offered by other vendors,” the FAQ states. “By using existing infrastructure, customers can enable a range of services without additional capital expenditure.”

The software and services from NooBaa will augment Red Hat’s existing Ceph Storage and OpenShift Container Storage products by providing a range of data services that help bridge the public-cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure, the company said. The NooBaa software will also complement Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform by providing a consistent data management interface alongside the application runtime environment.

Hurwitz Group’s Jean Bozman

Red Hat said it will provide more plans and timelines over the coming months about the acquisition and what it will mean in terms of whether NooBaa’s technologies will be offered as open source like other Red Hat technologies.

Jean S. Bozman, a principal analyst with Hurwitz & Associates, told Channel Futures that the acquisition fits with the company’s recent efforts to build out its storage portfolio for hybrid-cloud use.

“In this case, it is adding scale-out storage technology from a startup company that will enhance support for finding, storing and retrieving unstructured data in highly distributed hybrid-cloud environments,” said Bozman. “Red Hat is adding to its current storage portfolio, which includes Gluster for file storage, Ceph for block and object storage, and Red Hat OpenShift containerized storage.”

By adding NooBaa’s data management technology, Red Hat will be able to help customers enhance and unify data administration with scale-out unstructured data stored in hybrid clouds, she said.

“Data access, data placement and data optimization are becoming extremely important for smooth and efficient storage operations inside hybrid clouds,” said Bozman. “Customers need visibility to find – and fully utilize – unstructured data resources for their enterprise workloads, and for [artificial intelligence] and [machine learning] analysis.”