DDN Acquires Intel Lustre File System Business Recently Stopped

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) acquired Intel’s Lustre File System business and related assets for undisclosed terms.

This acquisition reinforces DDN’s presence in for data at scale, while providing Lustre customers with enhanced field support and a technology roadmap.

The acquisition also enables DDN to expand Lustre’s position from HPC and Exascale into growth markets such as analytics, AI and hybrid cloud.

The storage company has spent the past decade developing and bringing to market some of advanced technologies for data processing at scale targeted at on premise or hybrid cloud environments, including DDN’s SFA OS big data embedded software, its distributed cloud and object technology, and more recently its IME software suite for flash, NVMe and GPU acceleration.

The acquisition of Lustre file system capability is a bold move that combines advanced file system technology with DDN’s already substantial HPC, analytics and cloud product portfolio.

“We are very pleased to acquire from Intel all assets related to the open-source Lustre file system and to welcome into the DDN family an experienced software development team for which we have always had tremendous respect and admiration,” said Alex Bouzari, DDN founder and CEO. “Over the next few years, we are going to invest significant resources to enhance usability and to broaden Lustre’s capabilities and feature set in the direction of flash-enabled performance, analytics, enterprise and hybrid cloud.”

Deployed in thousands of data centers in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, financial services, academia, research and HPC labs, and consistently earning the number one spot as the file system of choice for the fastest computers, Lustre has long been recognized as an advanced parallel file system technology.

“Over the past few years, Intel has enhanced the Lustre technology and contributed to a now thriving Lustre open-source ecosystem,” said Rajeeb Hazra, Intel corporate VP and GM of enterprise and government, data center group. “DDN has the expertise to provide continued development and seamless support for existing customers. Intel will continue to participate in the Lustre community and collaborate on open source technologies that enable our strategies and products.”

DDN will operate the Lustre team as an autonomous division, ensuring support of the Lustre customer and partner ecosystem. The division will be run by industry veteran Robert Triendl, SVP, DDN, who has been instrumental in growing DDN’s involvement in Lustre over the past decade.

“Lustre users today are running some of the most critical and complex workloads in the industry. Lustre underpins leading deep learning and AI environments for autonomous vehicle development, supports the most demanding workflows in the life sciences and energy sectors, and enables powerful commercial analytics workflows in the cloud,” said Triendl. “This acquisition, and our continuing cooperation with Intel, will ensure that Lustre remains the world’s leading platform for compute and data-intensive workloads, scaling from small clusters running enterprise analytics to the world’s most powerful compute systems with tens of thousands of clients, while further expanding its capabilities in AI and cloud.”