We asked Sun's Peter Bojanic, Director of Engineering for the Lustre
group to give us a quick glance at what Sun has been up to with Lustre
since the acquisition of CFS back in September 2007:
Q: Will Lustre continue to be open source?
A: Absolutely. The Lustre source code will continue to be
released under the GPL 2.0 and we have no intention of changing that.
Further, Sun has encouraged the Lustre team to be 'more open' and we've
taken concrete steps to put this mission in motion. For example, at
SC07 we announced our CVS source code repository is now open for
anonymous check-outs: Lustre users can get the latest sources for all
versions of Lustre. First thing in 2008 we announced that our
architecture team has migrated their conversations from internal
mailing lists to the public lustre-devel forum. We've made our early
prototypes of the user space OSS w/ ZFS/DMU support available through
the lustre.org web site. And users can look forward to a few more
pleasant surprises in the coming weeks.
Q: How does the Lustre team look now that they have been fully
integrated within Sun?
A: We're pretty much that same, but better. The first thing we
did as part of our integration was to recruit a couple of experienced
development managers from Sun into the Lustre team. This not only added
needed capacity to our management team, but also introduced intimate
mentorship and guidance into our ranks. We also plan to strengthen a
few other areas like Quality Engineering and Architecture and we will
be investing in our test lab which will grow by about 20 nodes that can
be reserved for testing. In February we will also bring a 100-node test
cluster online for at- scale testing.
All of our teams are building bridges with associated groups at Sun.
Business Development is working with Global Sales and Service to add
wisdom to Sun's HPC efforts. Our downloads (including sources) is
served through a Sun web server as is our Operations Manual (now Sun
branded). The lustre.org site remains firmly in place as does Bugzilla.
But, I wouldn't say that we're "fully integrated" yet. This will be
an on-going process that will take place over the coming months.
Q: How will Sun continue to support customers like HP, Dell, DDN
that currently ship Lustre?
A: The Lustre team is fully committed to supporting our
relationships and commitments to our partners. Sun fully realizes that
one of the compelling benefits of Lustre is that it runs on so many
different platforms -- even ones that we may be competing with.
Internally we have "firewalls" in place to protect sensitive partner
information in order to preserve the competitive landscape of Lustre.
On the other hand, being part of Sun creates a new climate for
collaboration in areas that we have compelling strength such as
networking and storage hardware and software, including ZFS.
Q: What can we expect with the next release of Lustre?
A: Lustre 1.8 is planned for next summer and will introduce
user space servers for both Linux and Solaris, running with ZFS/DMU.
We'll continue to support the existing in-kernel servers for Linux with
ext3 until Lustre 2.0 at the end of the calendar year. In 2.0 we'll
release clustered metadata servers, enabling the same kind of
scalability for metadata that we have for storage servers today. And,
although it will also mark the end of in-kernel servers and ext3, Linux
will remain strategic to the future of Lustre.
Q: What do you think is the most exciting opportunity we will see
for Lustre in the near future?
A: Getting to user space is a huge deal for Lustre. Not only
because that is the optimal path for multi-platform support of ZFS/DMU
but also because it removes the burden of having to maintain kernel
patches for Linux. The encumbrance of kernel patches has made
development and debugging of Lustre considerably more complex than in
user space; it has slowed our support for new Linux kernels and
distros; and it's even been the source of some nasty regressions when
unsupported kernel APIs changed from under us. We're very confident in
the direction we are taking and have substantially de-risked the user
space strategy with our early benchmarks published to lustre-discuss
during SC07 last year.
Peter Bojanic is Director of Engineering for Sun Microsystems and
leads the Lustre group, including the HPC Software Stack team for
Linux. Prior to joining Sun, he was VP of Engineering for Cluster File
Systems where he ran development, support, and sustaining efforts. A
long time Linux and Open Source developer, Bojanic has built Internet
appliances, enterprise systems, and commercial e-commerce web
applications.
