Xyratex thrusts a Lustre cluster knuckleduster at Intel's bluster

Storage biz gobbles HPC wizardry from Oracle

Storage biz Xyratex is polishing its high-performance computing credentials by acquiring the Lustre trademark, logo, website and associated intellectual property from Oracle. Xyratex said it will support Lustre's community-oriented development.

Lustre is an open-source cluster file system popular in supercomputer land. Once upon a time it was developed and supported by Whamcloud, which Intel bought last July.

Lustre came about through work by Carnegie Mellon University researcher Peter Braam who devised a cluster-ready file system. Sun bought it in 2007. Oracle bought Sun in 2010 and this is where Lustre ended up.

Six of the top-10 high-performance computing clusters in the world use Lustre as do more than 60 of the 100 largest HPC installations.

Xyratex came on the Lustre scene by developing a clustered supercomputer-grade storage array called ClusterStor as away to grow the business in the face of declining revenues from its business of building arrays for IBM, NetApp and others. ClusterStor runs Lustre, hence Xyratex's interest.

The company said it "will assume responsibility for providing support to Lustre customers going forward", but it looks as though it is now in competition with Intel's Whamcloud.

Xyratex CEO Steve Barber said his company "strongly believes that all members of the Lustre community need to continue to play a part in the evolution of the code and the benefits it delivers over the long term".

Can nimble Xyratex thrust a Lustre knuckle-duster at Intel? The world is waiting. ®