Today Xyratex announced that the company has acquired the original Lustre trademark, logo, website and associated intellectual property from Oracle, and will assume responsibility for providing support to Lustre customers going forward. The company say it plans to advance the global Lustre portfolio by supporting the community-oriented development of Lustre as an open source file system and continuing to work in conjunction with the broader community to help chart the best path forward for this key technology.

Lustre is a powerful open source file system, and Xyratex 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,” said Steve Barber, CEO of Xyratex. “We want to ensure that current Lustre customers get the best possible feature roadmap and support, and we intend to engage the entire community to advance the Lustre technology. We also appreciate Oracle’s support of Lustre, and their efforts to ensure the long-term success of the technology.”

From this reporter’s perspective, this is really good news for the Lustre community. Oracle owned the Lustre assets since it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, and the company didn’t take kindly to organizations using the Lustre trademark in the past. Now with these assets in the hands of an active Lustre community member (Xyratex is a board-level sponsor of OpenSFS), one could say that Jack has effectively rescued the Open Source Goose from the mean old Giant.

OpenSFS actively supports the HPC open source file system community of which Xyratex is an active Member,” said Norm Morse, CEO at OpenSFS. “This acquisition gives Xyratex a great opportunity in concert with other members of the Lustre community to continue the stability needed to ensure Lustre remains a vital part of HPC going forward.  We look forward to working with Xyratex in the future.”

With their ClusterStor products now being distributed by the likes of Cray, HP, and Dell, Xyratex is now well-positioned to move forward with their increasing focus on HPC and Big Data markets. Powered by Lustre, ClusterStor technology not only holds the title for world’s fastest file system at over 1 Terabyte/sec, they managed to accomplish that number with about half the storage devices of the next runner-up.

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Over at HPC Wales, an interview with Dr. Tatiana Tatarinova from the Glamorgan Computational Biology Research Group looks at how her team has been better able to study the genes, proteins, evolution and processes inside a cell using mathematical modelling and computational simulation.

There’s a revolution in the lab-based sciences and computing technologies. We can process enormous volumes of diverse data quite cheaply, and at the same time new experimental techniques are continuously being developed. Through integrating both, we can produce unprecedented information about biological processes: with the use of high performance computing this has the potential to impact all aspects of life and all scientific disciplines.”

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