Sun strengthens HPC storage with Cluster File Systems deal
Linux and Solaris to benefit.
By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service | Published: 16:44, 13 September 2007
Sun has made a small acquisition to bolster its high performance computing (HPC) storage offerings, after the server giant agreed to acquire a majority of the assets of Cluster File Systems.
The acquisition, almost lost in the clamour over Sun’s expanded partnership with Microsoft, means that it will get the Lustre File System, an open-source software distribution widely used in large computing systems.
The company did not disclose the terms of the deal, which it expects to close sometime in October.
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Lustre can manage and retrieve files on clusters with tens of thousands of nodes. Sun will make Lustre work on Sun’s Solaris OS and will continue developing and distributing it for Linux and Solaris on multiple vendors’ systems. The file system complements the Sun Constellation Architecture for HPC systems, Sun said.
The two companies aren’t strangers. They have already worked together on several large clusters, including one at the Texas Advanced Computing Center with 1.7 petabytes of storage. In July, Cluster said Lustre would start using Sun’s OpenSolaris ZFS disk file system on Lustre servers that run Linux.
