Red Hat Adds Data Dedupe and Compression via Permabit Acquisition

As a step toward making data deduplication and compression software universally available as open source software, Red Hat this week announced it has acquired Permabit.

Gunnar Hellekson, senior director of product management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Virtualization, says that the data duplication and compression software developed by Permabit will be embedded in RHEL, which Hellekson notes means every other Red Hat project based on RHEL code, including Gluster storage software, will also inherit the Permabit software.

“We open source everything we acquire,” says Hellekson.

The decision to make data deduplication and compression software a core part of the operating system comes at a time when the amount of data that the average enterprise IT organization is struggling to manage continues to expand exponentially. Making data duplication and compression software more broadly available should also make it simpler for IT departments trying to manage increasingly dense environments made up of virtual machine and containers simpler.

“In most IT environments, 80 percent of the virtual machines and containers are identical,” says Hellekson.

Historically, storage vendors have charged IT organizations extra for the privilege of deduping and compressing their data. Going forward, however, it would appear data deduplication and compression is finally now about to become a core capability versus a suite of tools that IT organizations have to pay extra for just to reduce the overall size of their data storage footprint.