Cray Assimilates ClusterStor from Seagate

Today Cray announced it has completed the previously announced transaction and strategic partnership with Seagate centered around the addition of the ClusterStor high-performance storage business.

Storage is the fastest-growing part of the expanding HPC market and Cray is positioned to be an even more important player in the storage market,” said Steve Conway, senior vice president of research at Hyperion Research. “As a pioneer in providing large-scale storage systems for supercomputers, it’s fitting that Cray will take over the ClusterStor line.”

With the strategic transaction now complete, Cray will continue to sell, support, develop, manufacture, and test ClusterStor storage solutions with Lustre, including the ClusterStor L300, the next-generation ClusterStor L300N and the ClusterStor SL220.

Cray will also continue to provide support for the ClusterStor product line for existing customers and will collaborate with Seagate to integrate future Seagate technologies into Cray storage products.

We are working to provide customers and partners with a seamless transition of the ClusterStor storage business to Cray,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

“With the constant growth of data and the need to move it quickly for data-intensive simulations and artificial intelligence models, the addition of the ClusterStor line enhances an important piece of our product portfolio. With the transition complete, ClusterStor customers and partners will be able to get purpose-built high-performance storage systems with industry-leading price/performance that are designed, manufactured, and supported by Cray and our partners.”

Cray will offer service and support for the more than 20 ClusterStor partners and resellers by incorporating a comprehensive service toolkit, shorter escalation path to development, and a single knowledge base.

As a long-time customer of Cray and Seagate storage systems, who are committed to the development of extreme-scale computing, we are thrilled to see Cray continue the development of this product,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Schulthess, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). “The addition of ClusterStor is a logical next step for Cray and our researchers and scientists will clearly benefit from this enhancement.”

The advantage of Cray’s ClusterStor line is its ability to make HPC storage systems simpler. ClusterStor is designed to reduce the complexity in the storage system to enable seamless system design, easy installation, workload management, data flow, scalability, system efficiency, and faster time to results. ClusterStor systems balance the value equation to achieve the right performance levels, scalability, and availability, all at the right budget.

“This move by Cray not only shows a commitment to the success of the ClusterStor storage systems, but also shows Cray’s commitment to the broader success of Lustre technology for HPC,” said Sarp Oral, president of OpenSFS. “For the Lustre community, we believe this transaction will benefit users by increasing engagement.”

“The Lustre-based ClusterStor storage solutions enhance Cray’s portfolio to provide its customers end-to-end solutions,” said Amita Potnis, research manager, IDC, Inc. “As data sprawl continues, customers can leverage ClusterStor storage solutions to gain insights through machine learning and artificial intelligence across many industries.”

Cray has added more than 125 employees and contractors and has assumed customer support obligations associated with the ClusterStor product line. The agreement was previously announced on July 26, 2017.

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