Xyratex Advances Lustre® Initiative, Assumes Ownership of Related Assets

HAVANT, United Kingdom, Feb. 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Xyratex Ltd (Nasdaq: XRTX), a leading provider of data storage technology, today announced 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. Xyratex has recently 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.

"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."

The Lustre file system, which was first released in 2003, is a client/server based, distributed architecture designed for large-scale compute and I/O-intensive, performance-sensitive applications. The Lustre architecture currently powers six of the top 10 high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in the world and more than 60 of the 100-largest HPC installations. It has emerged as a particularly popular choice in the meteorology, simulation, oil and gas, life science, rich media and finance sectors.

This purchase also gives Xyratex the opportunity to continue to leverage Lustre and provide more value through its best-of-breed ClusterStor™ family of scale-out HPC data storage solutions. ClusterStor delivers a new standard in file system performance, scalability and efficiency, and brings together what were previously discrete server, network and storage platforms with their own separate software layers. The results are integrated, modular, scale-out storage building blocks that enable systems to scale both performance and capacity while aggressively reducing space, power and administrative overhead.

"Cray has been using Lustre as our primary parallel file system for the past 10 years, and has deployed some of the largest and most successful Lustre installations in the world with a variety of storage products," said Barry Bolding, vice president of storage and data management at Cray. "We have recently worked with Xyratex to deploy successful Lustre installations in the government, energy, manufacturing and academic markets with the Cray Sonexion storage system, including the record-breaking NCSA installation running Lustre at over 1TB/sec. This announcement is another important step for Lustre and the OpenSFS community, and shows the promising future of the Lustre file system in supercomputing and Big Data."

"Xyratex' deep knowledge of Lustre, and ability to deploy and support it, has been critical in helping NCSA bring the Blue Waters system into production and making a new class of computational and data focused petascale system usable for our scientific and engineering teams," said Dr. William Kramer, Blue Waters Deputy Directory at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Application, whose Blue Waters supercomputer is amongst the fastest and most efficient in the world. "With Xyratex in a leadership role and continuing to work with the broader community, we have the utmost confidence that Lustre will continue to produce significant innovation, for the benefit of computational and data focused communities."

"This strategic move by Xyratex is great news for the worldwide HPC community and the technical computing industry, because it shows a significant commitment to the future of Lustre," said Earl Joseph, program vice president of high-performance systems at IDC. "Xyratex has been an integral member of the HPC and open-source community, and has worked with many partners in the community to bring Lustre to end users and deliver tremendous value. With Xyratex in this role, I'm looking forward to see what's next for Lustre in terms of innovation and value, especially as we race towards exascale solutions."

"Our organization is committed to facilitating collaboration and support for Lustre in the open file system community," said Hugo Falter, director of European Open File System (EOFS). "Time and time again Xyratex has demonstrated its commitment to move Lustre forward with the rest of the open source community and make it more reliable for end users. I have complete confidence that Xyratex will remain true to this commitment over the long term."

"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."

"Xyratex, through this purchase, puts Lustre into the hands of a company that is focused on the needs of High Performance Computing, which is a good thing for the HPC community," said Addison Snell, CEO at Intersect360 Research. "Over the past few years the community has made significant progress in addressing these concerns, and Xyratex is well-positioned to facilitate the continued development and evolution of Lustre in the years ahead."

"Xyratex's knowledge of Lustre, and ability to deploy and support it, is of tremendous value to the Lustre community," said Tommy Minyard, director of advanced computing systems at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). "With Xyratex continuing to play an active role going forward, we have the utmost confidence that the Lustre community will continue to produce significant innovation, for the benefit of everyone."

"Xyratex' acquisition of the Lustre assets secures the trust the community needs to continue investing in Lustre as a critical data access technology," said Peter ffoulkes, research director for servers, virtualization and cloud computing at 451 Research. "Lustre is an integral component of some of the fastest and largest data storage systems in production today, a requirement that is only going to increase as the 'Internet of Things' feeds the proliferation of 'Big Data' in both private and public cloud environments. As the largest supplier of OEM data storage offerings, Xyratex has taken a strategic step to ensure the continued adoption of Lustre as a preferred solution for the most demanding data storage and access environments."

Xyratex is active and plays an integral role within several Lustre and HPC community organizations, including: OpenSFS; European Open File System (EOFS); the Exascale I/O Workgroup (EIOW); and the European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing (ETP4HPC).

About Xyratex
Xyratex is a leading provider of data storage technology, including modular solutions for the enterprise data storage industry and hard disk drive (HDD) capital equipment for the HDD industry. Xyratex enterprise data storage platforms provide a range of advanced, scalable data storage solutions for the Original Equipment Manufacturer and High Performance Computing communities. As the largest capital equipment supplier to the HDD industry, Xyratex enables disk drive manufacturers and their component suppliers to meet today's technology and productivity requirements. Xyratex has over 25 years of experience in research and development relating to disk drives, storage systems and manufacturing process technology.

Founded in 1994 in an MBO from IBM, and with headquarters in the United Kingdom, Xyratex has an established global base with R&D and operational facilities in North America, Asia and Europe.

Lustre is a registered trademark of Xyratex Ltd. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Xyratex Ltd