Raleigh-based Red Hat is making another move to embrace cloud computing – in particular OpenStack – by acquiring Inktank Ceph Enterprise in a deal worth $175 million.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is paying cash for the company.

The deal was announced early Wednesday.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Inktank to the Red Hat family,” said Brian Stevens, chief technology officer at Red Hat, in the deal announcement, “They have built an incredibly vibrant community that will continue to be nurtured as we work together to make open the de facto choice for software-defined storage. Inktank has done a brilliant job assembling a strong ecosystem around Ceph and we look forward to expanding on this success together. The strength of these world-class open storage technologies will offer compelling capability as customers move to software-based scale-out storage systems.”

Red Hat has embraced OpenStack as a means of helping clients develop cloud computing applications and solutions.

Like the Linux operating system, in which Red Hat is the global leader, OpenStack is based on open standards.

Inktank Ceph Enterprise focuses on storage software for public and private (closed) clouds. Many of its customers are OpenStack users, according to Red Hat.

“Ceph is the hottest open source, software-defined storage system available,” according to Inktank. “Massively scalable object, block, and file storage in a unified platform at the lowest cost per gig.”

Inktank’s solutions are based on Ceph, which is open source.

“With a shared commitment to open source, open standards and customer success, joining forces with Red Hat is something we are all very excited about,” said Sage Weil, founder and CTO of Inktank. “We believe our open storage technologies will be critical in the management of data in the coming era of cloud computing. Joining Red Hat will no doubt lead to tremendous innovation that will ultimately serve the industry well and answer the demand for open storage solutions fully integrated with existing and emerging data center architectures such as OpenStack.”

Weil is the creator of the Ceph project which he originally designed as part of his PhD research in Storage Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In a blog post, Weil writes about why he decided to make the deal. He trusts Red Hat.

Red Hat already offers a storage suite based on Gluster, another company that it acquired in 2011. 

Inktank is privately held with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It has 50 employees.