Sun Buys the Assets of Cluster File Systems

Published: September 27, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Cluster File Systems, the creator of the open source Lustre high-performance, clustered file system for high performance supercomputing, is bowing out of the market and has sold the assets to Lustre and other unspecified intellectual property to Sun Microsystems.

Sun, which has been struggling to build and buy a storage business that matches its well-respected server offerings for as long as anyone can remember, and by grabbing ahold of Lustre, Sun now controls an open source cluster file system project that is well respected and that is the file system of choice for HPC rivals Silicon Graphics, Cray, and Hewlett-Packard for certain supercomputer workloads. The Lustre file system is distributed under the GNU General Public License, so Sun did not have to pay anything to use Lustre. But Sun undoubtedly wants to have one more open source project that it controls, and having already partnered with Cluster File Systems back in June to port Lustre from Linux to Solaris, Sun could not let the company go down the tubes or fall into enemy hands.

Cluster File Systems was founded in 2001 by Peter Braam, a leader in file system and storage software design who has worked at Oxford University and Carnegie Mellon University--both hotbeds for software architecture. Lustre is the result of the research Braam has performed at CMU, which has been supplemented by the major government-sponsored supercomputer labs in the United States. The problem that Lustre tries to solve is how to keep clusters with thousands or tens of thousands of server nodes fed with data, and the answer, of course, is to use a clustered file system made up of thousands of server nodes themselves. Luster has been shown to scale to support as many as 25,000 server nodes in an HPC cluster, and is one of the few options customers have for such large HPC machines.

The development team behind Lustre that has been getting their paychecks from Cluster File Systems now work for Sun. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sun says that it will continue to support Lustre on top of Linux and will continue to work on the port of Lustre from Linux to Solaris 10, riding on top of Sun's Zettabyte File System. No word on if Lustre will be ported to Windows Compute Cluster Services, but if Windows takes off in HPC centers, given Sun's Windows OEM partnership with Microsoft, this could happen.

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