Start-Up Whamcloud Forms for HPC Storage

Whamcloud, Inc., a venture-backed company formed from worldwide high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans, announces its entry into the market for scalable high performance storage solutions based on the popular combination of the industry-standard Lustre massively parallel distributed file system for Linux application and data storage environments.

As the parallel file storage market continues to evolve and corporations continue to try and extract information from increasingly large data sets, the need for a hardware-agnostic, visionary file systems company is becoming increasingly apparent.

To answer this requirement, Whamcloud has established a focused business strategy that is built upon three fundamental corporate objectives:

Whamcloud will combine the world’s leading HPC and storage talent to evolve the state of parallel storage with a strategic focus on the most scalable applications, specifically high performance and cloud computing
Whamcloud will contribute and evolve open source file storage technologies, including the Lustre file system, upon an open-source Linux foundation using Linux storage technology
Whamcloud will focus on enabling open source Lustre storage technology in the industry by opening up file system support to the whole industry, with a hardware-agnostic storage certification and support program

Immediately, Whamcloud is establishing a thought and experience leadership position in the marketplace by announcing the addition of key corporate managers:

Brent Gorda, Chief Executive Officer, joining Whamcloud from the US Department of Energy where he was involved in program funding and strategic adoption of the Lustre File System at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other ASCI labs.
Eric Barton, Chief Technology Officer, recently Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems / Oracle and Chief Architect with the Lustre group.
Robert Read, Principal Engineer, was Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems / Oracle leading the Lustre 2.0 project.

"There is tremendous demand for leadership from a professional engineering organization that is focused on evolving Lustre for the next 10 years of HPC and cloud storage," said Brent Gorda, Whamcloud CEO. "History has proven that hardware-oriented purchases of open-platform file storage technologies are disruptive to the growth of scale-out storage technology. First and foremost, Whamcloud will ensure broad and continued international adoption of these technologies through a hardware-agnostic customer approach, across a broad array of data-hungry markets."

Comments

Great guys and great idea at start-up Whamcloud, based in Danville, CA, and that got $10 million in private financing.

CEO Gorda comes from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one a world's largest HPC users in the world.

There is a very small number of companies focused on HPC storage that needs technology completely different from HPC computing and traditional storage infrastructure. Successful DataDirect Networks is one of them, but also LSI, Panasas, RAID, Inc. or Terascala. NetApp tried to enter into this market, but, like EMC, had poor results in this field. Most of the other ones are mainly selling computers and just adding storage sometimes coming from outside sources. Here, we have in mind IBM, Oracle/Sun, SGI, HP, Fujitsu, Bull or Dell.

Their customers, generally universities and research centers, love Lustre file system - in which the executives of Whamcloud have an extensive background -, and Infiniband for extremely high IO/s they need to transfer their petabytes of data.