Terascala tries to put a coat of paint on Oracle's Lustre changes

Terascala has posted an open letter to customers on their website, outlining their take on how Oracle’s recent shifts in Lustre policy will impact Terascala customers

Recently, Oracle has announced a planned roadmap for the Lustre File system. For Terascala customers, this will have no change on their appliance installations or their ongoing support. Terascala provides support for our customers, including many very large scale Lustre-based deployments, for the life of their system/contract. This includes supporting existing installations and performing validation of new Lustre releases on the Terascala appliances.

Terascala also has built relationships with Oracle that give them direct access to the Wizard when they have big problems.

The rest of the post goes on the clarify what they perceive as misunderstandings by “various constituencies”

Concern: Lustre will no longer be open source.
What they actually said: The core Lustre file system including versions 1.8 and 2.0 will remain open source licensed under GPL 2.0

Concern: Oracle will no longer support Lustre and the community of users.
What they actually said: Oracle intends to continue to fix bugs for this [1.8] release (Lustre 1.8.3 was just released in April 2010). Additionally, Oracle intends to continue to fix bugs moving forward.

Concern: Oracle will not support non-Oracle/Sun hardware for Lustre version 2 and beyond.
What they actually said: Oracle intends to introduce a Lustre 2 qualification program to certify other hardware platforms.

I find this completely unconvincing spin. I know that their business depends upon those things being true, but fixing bugs in old versions of software is not continuing to support the community of users — it is a transition plan that will give those users a gentle glide path to another filesystem. It won’t take more than a few years for Lustre 1.8.xxx to be completetly unacceptable relative to the current version of the filesystem or competing offerings. Also, the Terascala spin doesn’t add anything to the last statement. Oracle said that you won’t be able to buy Oracle support for Lustre and non-Oracle hardware. That remains true, and it is a change.