Red Hat has announced that it has acquired the assets and technology of Permabit Technology Corporation, a provider of software for data deduplication, compression and thin provisioning.

With the addition of Permabit’s data deduplication and compression capabilities to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat will be able to better enable enterprise digital transformation through more efficient storage options.

Traditional Linux filesystems lack of those capability (compression was a possible extended attribute, but has never been implemented well) and compare to Windows filesytem has become a big gap (although ReFS does not have deduplication features, but just an optimization on file copy operation).

I’ve wrote about Permabit in some posts (Add deduplication and compression to an Linux server and Permabit VDO 6 is available in GA) because was one of the solution available to add simply those features, but the doubts where on the possible support.

With Permabit’s technology, Red Hat can now bring powerful data deduplication and compression features into Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, which will also enhance capabilities across Red Hat’s hybrid cloud and storage technologies, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Storage. Consistent with its commitment to delivering fully open source solutions and upstream-first innovation, Red Hat plans to open source Permabit’s technology. This will enable customers to use a single, supported and fully-open platform to drive storage efficiency, without having to rely on heterogeneous tools or customized and poorly-supported operating systems.

The transaction is expected to have no material impact to Red Hat’s guidance for its second fiscal quarter ending Aug. 31, 2017, or fiscal year ending Feb. 28, 2018.

Will be interesting see if Red Hat will keep this product also as an independend product available also for other Linux distributions.