Dear Friends,

Greetings from Whamcloud and thank you for subscribing to this newsletter to follow our activities here. Since our last letter a tremendous amount of significant activity has gone on, as you will see when you read the enclosed. In the past two months alone, we have released Lustre version 1.8.6-wc and the community release of Lustre 2.1. We have also won many significant contracts and rapidly progressed development on existing contracts. Finally, we are nearing beta on Project Hydra, which is a platform-agnostic management tool that will broaden the reach of Lustre by significantly simplifying the art and science of installation, maintenance and troubleshooting.

Paris LUG

Last week was the first user group meeting in Europe with our colleagues at EOFS and friends at CEA hosting close to one hundred people in the City of Light (Paris). In addition to being well attended, the enthusiasm was high and technical exchange strong. If you weren’t able to attend or just want to see the slides, they are available on the EOFS website here.

2.1 Release

Following closely on the heels of the production release stream (1.8.x), we announced a significant leap forward for the Lustre community with the feature release of 2.1. This announcement is the goal we were aimed at in January when we announced that we would lead a community effort to get Lustre back on track and moving forward. After nine months of hard work – success! It has been a long haul and a huge effort by Peter Jones and team at Whamcloud, as well as the community. We are overjoyed to announce GA available now here.

This release is called a “feature release” as it adds significant new features such as an 8x increase in the LUN size (a jump to 128TB OST sizes up from 16TB) and full client and server support for Red Hat Enterprise LINUX (RHEL) 6 and Community ENTerprise OS (CentOS) 6.

Contract Wins

Whamcloud continues to service our customers well and win business as a result. A few of the highlights here include the $2.1 Million development contract with the OpenSFS organization and participating with Dell for the NSF track II “Stampede” system with a 75PB (raw) / 55PB (formatted) Lustre FS to be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing center.

Training

Amid the excitement of everything going on, we’ve also managed to hold training classes and schedule more for the near future. If you are interested in signing up for a class or would like to have us tailor a class specific to your location, please contact Lindsey Stack lstack@whamcloud.com for information on how to participate.

The planned classes at the moment include:

December 19-22, 2011, Bologna, Italy
January 19-22, 2012, TBD (CO/CA), USA
Feburary 7-9, 2012, Oxford England

Watch our wiki for news on upcoming training classes.

Roadmap/Exascale

Recently Whamcloud participated in the DOE call (RFI) for exascale development topics. We are excited by the potential to leverage the most widely deployed file system in HPC to build capabilities for future extreme computing environments. We recently authored an article for the community in HPCWire to describe why we feel Lustre is well-suited for this program.

SC11/Hydra

Believe it or not, it is time to start thinking about Supercomputing 2011 (SC11) in Seattle. We are starting to schedule meetings, so please contact Lindsey to get on our schedule before it fills up. At a minimum, please stop by our booth (#2116) and say hi!

The big news to watch for at SC will be our demonstration of our GUI-based management tool set (code named Hydra) which will be sure to delight those of you seeking an easier way to install and care for your Lustre file system. This will work on any hardware, and provide deep integration into commonly used systems. This is a powerful tool built by the team that brought you the file system – so be sure to come check it out.

Finally, we have many events going on at SC: talks, demonstrations, parties. We’ll update you on schedules as we get closer to SC11. See our website for more on this event, or to schedule a meeting with us.

We’re Here for the Lustre Community

As the only platform neutral source of Lustre, we are committed to the open source technology and pledge that our work on the Lustre tree will be done in the open and provided back to the community as open source. Community response to Whamcloud has been and continues to be great. We want you to know that all of us here at Whamcloud appreciate your business and your contributions to the community.

We appreciate hearing from you. Please send your feedback to if you have thoughts or suggestions we need to hear. To contact sales, sales@whamcloud.com is where you want to direct your attention. We strive to be prompt, cheerful and focused on your needs.

Finally, as always, please feel free to contact me directly at .

Brent Gorda
CEO, Whamcloud

Brent is CEO of Whamcloud, lives in the East Bay Area, loves his family and his road bike.