General FAQ

This acquisition will expand our HPC portfolio with unique technology and expertise and make it easier for customers to buy integrated HPC clusters. It will also make it easier for us and our partners to sell and support solutions that include Lustre. After the closing, CFS's current end user customers will also be able to get access to the full scale of technology and services that Sun can offer.

HPC continues to be a strategic focus for Sun. We are continually investing in a broad, open and differentiated HPC portfolio. One of the recent manifestations of this strategy was the announcement of the Sun Constellation System at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Germany in June this year.

CFS's primary focus has been on the high-end of the HPC market where large scale clusters dominate, and they have a well established leadership position for parallel file systems in this space. CFS holds significant market share in the technical computing space with 20% of the top 100 HPC clustered systems, and more than half of the top 30 installations. This deal will allow us to leverage this market position and to combine Lustre with the rest of Sun's HPC portfolio for the broadest reach in the industry. Lustre will also be ported to Solaris to drive adoption of Solaris in HPC. Together we can address a larger business opportunity for HPC storage in clusters that can scale from medium size to petascale.

The Sun Constellation System is the world's first, and still only, open petascale HPC architecture. It's an integrated concept based on open interfaces and standard components that provides choice and flexibility for our customers as well as the opportunity to benefit from top to bottom integration and system level efficiencies. The Sun Constellation system as shown at ISC is scalable from entry level to petascale clusters within one plug-and-play compatible architecture. It goes far beyond the standard compute nodes and includes ultra dense blade systems (C48), a revolutionary ultra dense infiniband switch (Magnum), very dense storage coupled with archival solutions (from Sun Fire X4500 to SL8500 Tape Libraries) and a complete software stack that includes Solaris with, for example, Dtrace and ZFS, Sun Grid Engine, HPC ClusterTools and an award-winning Sun Studio developer tool set. Sun also offers architecture, migration and integration services for HPC - rounding out an HPC portfolio that is unmatched in breadth, openness and scalability.

This acquisition of CFS's intellectual property assets is expected to improve Sun's overall competitive position in HPC. Sun has already previewed the Sun Constellation System, the most open petascale HPC platform on the market. This acquisition shows our long-term commitment to HPC and strengthens our portfolio, enabling Sun and our partners to offer customers an even more complete, open HPC solution. Sun and CFS also have some very keen collaborative interests in expanding the technology jointly by integration of CFS's Server Network Striping (Network RAID) with Sun's ZFS for a much more robust offering. In addition, Sun and CFS see the integration of SAM-QFS as a natural fit for long term care of customer data. Finally, both CFS and Sun's Strategies around pNFS fit very nicely together with both companies approaches of this future offering.

Sun is committed to continuing to open source Lustre. Sun will make Lustre available on Solaris and also continue to offer CFS as key component of our HPC solution addressing high-end Linux Compute Clusters to allow Sun to sell more systems and storage into the X86 space. In 2006, Linux represented 65% of the systems revenue generated by the HPC Cluster Server market, according to IDC.

Sun is committed to continue to support Lustre on non-Sun hardware, both for existing customers as well as in the future.

As with the question about non-Sun hardware, Sun is committed to support Lustre on Linux, both for existing customers and in the future.

CFS's current business model is well aligned with Sun. Sun is the biggest commercial contributor to the open source community and we already allow customers to use most of our software for free, paying only for support. Sun will continue to develop Lustre in open source under the GPL, and allow customers to download and use it for free. Sun will continue to support Lustre via for-fee support contracts.

The problem of assuring data integrity and reliability is becoming critical as the size and complexity of storage solutions grow almost exponentially with the size of clusters and accumulated storage capacity needs. Unlike traditional file systems, ZFS includes new breakthrough technologies and strategies that address this at the source. Data stored on disk with ZFS is always consistent. ZFS also has the unique ability to detect and repair silent errors not detectable with traditional approaches while the system is live, virtually eliminating the need to take the system offline to repair file system errors. Integration of ZFS and Lustre in a layered approach means that Lustre can leverage all the features of ZFS in a cluster file system environment.

Complementary. ZFS is a local file system, not a clustered file system. Recent CFS announcements include the use of OpenSolaris ZFS disk file system on CFS servers running Linux operating systems.

Today, Lustre and QFS coexist in high-end Linux cluster environments. QFS provides the scalable storage environment required to keep up with the volume of data generated by the compute cluster.

Demand for HPC storage and data management is being driven primarily by the data explosion resulting from the enormous performance gains on the computation side. Unlike Lustre, QFS provides a complete data management solution with integrated storage archive management (SAM) for long term data retention. Sun's Commercial HPC solutions targeting mid-size Solaris clusters (128 nodes, soon to be 256) have a complete solution with QFS and SAM today.

At the close of the asset purchase, many members of CFS's talented team joined Sun, including CFS's CEO and founder, Peter Braam, a recognized leader in the file system industry. CFS's top-notch technical and customer support team will join Sun's Systems Group, bringing together Sun's HPC solution experts with CFS's Linux HPC solution experts, enhancing Sun's competitive position in the HPC space.

Since Lustre is the industry leader in HPC clusters and creates a compelling differentiator for the Thumper data server, we want to ensure the groups working on those products will be closely aligned, especially in this initial phase after integration. By bringing together Sun's HPC hardware experts and CFS's Linux HPC software experts, we'll be able to significantly enhance Sun's competitive position in the HPC space.

Sun and CFS will work together to migrate CFS's existing agreements to Sun and all existing customers, operating systems, hardware and OEM/business partners will continue to be supported.

Sun does not comment on future plans or speculation concerning potential acquisitions. What we can tell you is that Sun is better positioned than at any point in its 25-year history to service the needs of customers and become a consolidator in the industry. Sun's strong balance sheet is a major asset that offers the company a high level of liquidity, which provides Sun with the flexibility for debt repayment, share repurchases, acquisitions, and other strategic investments.

Sun plans to continue using "Lustre" as the name of the open source software product.

Lustre will be available for sale via all Sun's channels and all current OEM's of CFS.

Sun is in the planning phase for products and services beyond the already committed roadmaps on both CFS's and Sun's side. We are unable to comment further at this time.