Inktank has issued its first release under new owner Red Hat, which also recently acquired Gluster.

Inktank is the company behind the Ceph storage product for object and block storage. Gluster brought the IT world GlusterFS.

According to one news report, the acquisition made waves in the development community that existed in support of the two open source vendors. As the report noted, there were those that were concerned that it would be killed off by the larger parent corporation. That was not the case.

The same report also noted Red Hat will be working on actually improving the services. The company announced the release of Inktank 1.2 today. The service will reportedly feature more flexibility and cost savings, according to reports. The service will allow enterprise users to store "cold" archival data as well as "hot" priority data, organizing them in a more efficient way for users. 

The acquisition was reportedly completed this past spring. According to a report, the sales price was around $175 million.

So what is Ceph and Gluster? How do they work?

Ceph 1.2 allows for the implementation of world class object and block storage software to enterprises. This is deployed in public or private clouds, including those using OpenStack.

Ceph is coupled, by Red Hat, with GlusterFS file system to deliver high-efficiency cloud storage solutions to enterprise users. In this new arrangement, service is available through one vendor, Red Hat.

The software is meant to categorize the ever-expanding amounts of data that enterprises are handling now in the cloud. This system helps effectively manage that data, in terms of access frequency and relevance. This process takes its lead from large organizations that found this to be the most practical way to categorize their data in a taxonomy that makes sense.

This strategy should also help organizations reduce costs associated with storage. A tiering approach is applied with Ceph so that users access storage when needed and performance and space can be applied in real time to meet demand on a fair pricing basis.

This means that Red Hat customers can effectively manage their budget based only on the performance options that they need and can set themselves. This model has also been applied in other recent companies' strategies, including Amazon and Google. IBM is a major cloud player in the space for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).