Only weeks after being acquired by IBM, Red Hat has expanded its hybrid cloud and storage portfolio around data portability with the addition of NooBaa.

NooBaa mainly develops software to manage data across hybrid and multi-cloud setups, providing an abstraction layer for storage systems such as Amazon S3 or Red Hat’s Ceph Storage.

As with so many cloud native approaches, NooBaa’s goal is to incorporate different infrastructure elements. To do so, it offers software developers a single endpoint for reading and writing data, making a combined storage strategy easier to implement.

The last part is something Red Hat seems to be especially keen on, since it claims data plays a critical role in its hybrid cloud strategy. NooBaa, founded in 2013, could mainly help out with a consistent data management interface and services to bridge public and on-premises infrastructure for the rest of the portfolio, it seems.

The focus of Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform is more about managing an application and offering a consistent developer experience across platforms, with NooBaa’s technology potentially adding a way of seamlessly managing the data – therefore helping with application portability as a whole.

Red Hat said NooBaa would “complement and enhance” its OpenShift Container Platform, OpenShift Container Storage and Ceph Storage.

The question as to whether NooBaa’s technology will become open source under the new owner isn’t entirely clear yet. In a FAQ about the acquisition Red Hat did reference its long standing commitment to open-sourcing technology, adding: “We have no reason to expect a change in this approach.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed while specific plans about the process of taking NooBaa open-source should be released in the coming months.