Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

There were rumblings over Christmas break of some big changes in the Lustre community, an open source file project under the control of Oracle, And while no one seems to want to go on the record at the moment, insideHPC has learned that some of Oracle’s key Lustre engineers have recently joined Whamcloud.

This is great news for the company - Bryon Neitzel (Engineering Manager), Andreas Dilger (Lustre Architect), and Peter Jones (Lustre Support Manager) are all coming on board by the end of January.

Word has it that Oracle has been working quietly behind the scenes with the Lustre Community on testing and qualification, while saying little publicly about the open source file system since they acquired Sun Microsystems in February, 2010. Since then, most, if not all of the lieutenants from the old Cluster File Systems company have left Oracle including Peter Bojanic (Xyratex), and Eric Barton and Robert Read (Whamcloud).

Now, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I would say that asking Oracle about their plans for Lustre is a waste of time. If there was a plan, the people who had an inkling of it have left. Without exception, they have all gone off to work on Lustre opportunities at other companies.

So therein lies the rub; Oracle’s bumbling about over the past 11 months may have just stirred things up enough to ensure Lustre’s survival for years to come:

• Three Lustre user communities have since sprung up including HPCFS, OpenSFS, and the European Open Filesystems Group.
• Whamcloud received $10m in startup financing to service and support Lustre
• Xyratex acquired ClusterStor, reuniting founding members of the Lustre engineering team
• The Lustre community took control of the Lustre user group and now there’s not even one vendor on their board.

If there is a moral to this story, I would say it’s that Lustre is in good hands. With half of the TOP500 using Lustre, the community is committed and the companies who recognize the opportunity are growing their pool of engineering talent in order to get their share.

This is certainly not the end of the Lustre saga, but after hearing nothing from Oracle for a while now, I think many of us have come to a rousing conclusion: What Larry Ellison says is unimportant, and we do not hear his words.

This article was first published at Inside HPC

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