Oracle Lustre Exodus Continues, Market Forces Respond

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I try to follow Lustre closely here at insideHPC. Lustre is widely deployed throughout the HPC spectrum and last I checked it was being used by seven of the top ten supercomputers in the world.
Peter Bojanic

Last week Peter Bojanic, Director of Lustre Engineering at Oracle, announced that he has left the company to join Xyratex. From his Linkedin profile:

On Monday I start my new job at Xyratex where I’ll be building storage products based on Lustre and other emerging high performance file systems. I’m excited to be working again with Dr. Peter Braam, one of the world’s foremost filesystem experts and the inventor of Lustre. The job involves some of what I’ve done with Lustre for the last 5+ years plus a whole lot of different. I’m energzied! This ain’t your gradma’s Lustre, folks.”

To put this move in perspective, Oracle has lost some of its key Lustre engineers in the past months including Eric Barton and Robert Read, but they all continue to work on Lustre with their new employers at Whamcloud and Xyratex. Both companies are participating in the new HPCFS Foundation for Lustre, so in some ways, the Lustre ecosystem has never been stronger.

A one thing remains the same in my mind; the Lustre community is determined and they have a lot of sweat investment in the future of this file system. It may be a time of great change in the community, but they’re not moving just because they don’t like the landlord.