Whamcloud » Looking Back on SC11

Holiday greetings from Whamcloud! I have barely had time to catch my breath following this year’s Supercomputing 2011 in Seattle, but I wanted to pass on some of the enthusiasm and energy Whamcloud encountered at the show.

Did you attend? Our booth was absolutely overflowing from start to finish. Thank you in particular to everyone who came by and asked great questions – and even helped to answer them, in some cases. I can’t tell you what a fabulous jolt of energy SC11 was for the whole Whamcloud team.

We had quite a few news bits around the show. In particular, the introduction of Chroma^TM – our enterprise storage platform – was very well received. We are bringing Lustre to new markets by enabling our partners to ship Lustre appliances that vastly simplify installation, configuration, maintenance, monitoring, and fault diagnosis. We think this is a major step forward. Chroma facilitates purpose-built appliances, extends the capabilities of the hardware, and reduces the need for rarified Lustre expertise. Chroma was demoed in not only our booth but in the Lustre Pavilion, in the DDN booth, and by the University of Indiana. We were also in the Microsoft booth showing of Lustre pNFS technology. If you haven’t seen a demo yourself, feel free to contact us. http://www.whamcloud.com/chroma/

We’ve had a great year and the reception at SC11 was the highlight for us. Thank you so much for your support and your business. Of course we’ll be at SC12 in Salt Lake City next year in a bigger booth with more cool hats.

With just a quick look back over the past year I can hardly believe how far Lustre has progressed. Whamcloud was founded over a year ago with the goal of restoring confidence in Lustre. We wanted to continue to fully support the Lustre community and its core open source philosophy. We wanted to make sure that Lustre development and support was high quality, highly available, dependable, and always vendor platform neutral. We feel we’ve succeeded. Ask anyone. Lustre is everywhere and is advancing more quickly than ever.

Moving forward, for Lustre to continue to grow, it needs a robust, healthy ecosystem of vendors and users. We’re focused on building this Lustre ecosystem and continuing the vendor-neutral aspect of the technology. Chroma is just one piece in this roadmap. We encourage you to join on us in 2012 to help push Lustre to new heights.

Building a company and supporting a community is not a hobby for us. It’s a passionate endeavor, requiring commitment and, frankly, endless energy. We really mean it when we say thank you for your support.

Season’s greetings to you and yours from the team at Whamcloud. We look forward to seeing you in the new year.

Go Lustre!

Brent