DataDirect Funds Open Source HPC Initiative

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced a series of HPC funding initiatives around the Lustre open source file system, aimed at providing scientists and researchers tools in order to accelerate the rate of invention and scientific innovation.

"We have always been firm believers in the critical importance of open source as an accelerator of research and innovation for the HPC community, and have invested tens of millions of dollars in support of that thesis," said Alex Bouzari, DDN CEO. "In response to requests from the HPC community, we are now stepping up our support and investment in the Lustre open source file system, thereby ensuring that Lustre remains the file system of choice for research facilities and corporations for the next decade."

The announcement comes after a period of uncertainty for HPC customers around the world following Oracle Corporation’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and Oracle’s perceived lack of clarity on whether they intend to extend the future of the Lustre file system. To add to the uncertainty, Oracle also has announced the end of life of Sun’s X45x0 storage platform, a high-density storage server which was often sold in conjunction with the Lustre file system.

With DDN’s ongoing large-scale investments, the Lustre file system promises to remain a stable and leading open file storage product for the HPC community at large, both for mainstream customers, as well as for higher-end exascale computing initiatives. DDN’s investment is of particular importance to universities, corporations, research centers and government labs who seek stability and a clear product roadmap for their file system of choice, and can now rest assured that their needs will be met.

As a testament to its investment, DDN is announcing the following initiatives:

• One year of free Lustre support for Sun and Oracle file system and hardware customers buying a two year support contract.
• Founding membership, investment and oversight in the OpenSFS.org file system consortium.
• Founding membership in the European Open Source Filesystem (OSF) SCE consortium.
• A strategic alliance with Whamcloud – in Lustre development and support.
• Multi-million dollar worldwide expansion of DDN’s Lustre engineering staff.

As a demonstration of its commitment to the Lustre community, DDN is announcing a promotional offer to Lustre users with existing Sun and Oracle storage systems and support contracts. From now until June 30, 2011, Sun and Oracle customers will be provided one additional free year of Lustre support as part of any purchase of a 2-year DDN Lustre file system support contract.

DDN is a supplier of Lustre-based storage solutions, providing a range of Lustre-integrated systems from workgroup to supercomputer. Leveraging its Lustre expertise, DDN has delivered more than 70 percent of the world’s Lustre deployed storage systems, according to the most recent TOP500 listing of supercomputers. These include the world’s single fastest file storage system at CEA in Europe – a 300GB/s installation.

"We believe it is DDN’s duty to help provide the investments and foundation on which the HPC community can build a very bright future," said Jeff Denworth, vice president of marketing for DDN. "DDN intends to continue to deliver to Lustre users worldwide the tools they need to deploy groundbreaking HPC applications."

DDN’s Lustre distribution, ExaScaler, is available in two distinct solutions built on DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) technology. The latest is the ExaScaler10KE, which is a pre-configured storage and file system appliance, built on an integrated virtual machine technology engineered to simplify deployment, while also improving application performance and cluster efficiency.