Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in

Continuent is probably best known for its database clustering technology for MySQL, as well as PostgreSQL, but the company has for some time had its sights set on expanding beyond open source databases and enabling horizontal database scalability.

It has just taken a major step towards delivering on both counts with the launch of Tungsten, its new stack of open source middleware technologies designed to enable low-cost databases to scale horizontally for database failover and continuity.

Tungsten includes includes Sequoia, the existing synchronous