Terascala's view
Terascala Statement on Lustre Support
To Our Customers and Partners:
With some of the recent changes taking place in the marketplace related to the Lustre file system, Terascala wanted to make it clear to our customers how these changes may affect them.
Terascala is the premier supplier of Lustre based storage appliances. Our fully integrated, fully supported storage appliances simplify the deployment and ongoing management of a parallel file system while delivering maximum performance.
Current Situation:
Recently, Oracle has announced a planned roadmap for the Lustre File system. For Terascala customers, this will have no change on their appliance installations or their ongoing support. Terascala provides support for our customers, including many very large scale Lustre-based deployments, for the life of their system/contract. This includes supporting existing installations and performing validation of new Lustre releases on the Terascala appliances.
Terascala’s team of Lustre experts will continue to support our customers and keep their environments running. Our Lustre development team has proven their expertise through the development, delivery, and ongoing support of the world’s only Lustre-based storage appliance. Our expertise has allowed us to turn the process of delivering a production worthy Lustre installation from a highly complex and time consuming project to a few hours of setup and configuration. We are continuing to grow our Lustre team and expertise internally, and work closely with independent and available Lustre resources in the industry. Additionally, Terascala has a formal support contract with the Oracle Lustre team that allows us to work with them directly if necessary. For some of our customers, our direct support contract with Oracle has enabled them to start or expand their commitment to Lustre without the challenge of having to develop their own independent support relationships. By adding the Terascala appliances to their environment, they are assured a fully supported installation with a single vendor providing focused support for today and the future.
Future:
Lustre remains the premier solution for high performance, highly scalable, open file systems. There is strong momentum to keep it open and evolving through a number of avenues. These include efforts by Oracle themselves and user / industry wide efforts to form a consortium to influence and / or drive future development. Terascala has already pledged membership to this effort. The value of a vibrant, committed community is a key component to expanding Lustre capabilities.
Oracle has indicated that they will be developing a certification program for supporting 3rd party Lustre based solutions. This will enable the Lustre team to insure a consistent set of hardware platforms are used and allow the development team to focus on feature development and not be consumed in platform support. Terascala, as a current Oracle partner, expects to fully participate in this program.
As part of their announcement regarding the future of Lustre, the Oracle team provided a number of statements that we believe are being misunderstood by various constituencies. These include:
Concern: Lustre will no longer be open source.
What they actually said: The core Lustre file system including versions 1.8 and 2.0 will remain open source licensed under GPL 2.0
Concern: Oracle will no longer support Lustre and the community of users.
What they actually said: Oracle intends to continue to fix bugs for this [1.8] release (Lustre 1.8.3 was just released in April 2010). Additionally, Oracle intends to continue to fix bugs moving forward.
Concern: Oracle will not support non-Oracle/Sun hardware for Lustre version 2 and beyond.
What they actually said: Oracle intends to introduce a Lustre 2 qualification program to certify other hardware platforms.
Terascala is proud to be part of the large community of Lustre users. That community is running some of the largest systems in the world, as well as thousands of smaller, key systems throughout various organizations. There is a large community of expert users, running and supporting installations reliability and independently. These sites will continue to make up a strong and vibrant Lustre community for many years.
Terascala will continue to keep you informed of any updates or changes. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, click here or send email to info@terascala.com