Starting today, Intel will contribute all Lustre features and enhancements to the open source community. This will mean that we will no longer provide Intel-branded releases of Lustre, and instead align our efforts and support around the community release.

These changes are designed to increase Intel’s involvement in the community and to accelerate technical innovation in Lustre. For the community as a whole this will mean easier access to the latest stable Lustre releases and an acceleration of the technical roadmap.

By open-sourcing all of our work – including the Intel Manager for Lustre software, our work on Hadoop, and features for the Intel-optimized releases, Intel will provide the opportunity for deeper collaboration in the ongoing development of Lustre tools, and a broader adoption of the technology.

We will continue to support our broad base of existing partners and customers, but will be focused on growing Lustre adoption with the added benefit of our alignment around the latest community releases. Our support offering post transition will be refocused on our traditional Lustre L3 offering. We will also continue to play a leading role in supporting the OpenSFS and EOFS communities, and in engaging partnerships to further the development of open source storage software such as Lustre and DAOS. By contributing our work directly to the community, we hope to further accelerate the development of software and tools to continue to grow Lustre, and future solutions for I/O heavy workloads.

We are proud of our role in making Lustre as popular as it is, and look forward to continuing to drive its growth. We will be platinum sponsors at the upcoming Lustre User Group meeting at the end of May and you can expect a strong participation in the event, with 7 talks scheduled for the main conference and our technical team active in the collocated developer events before the conference.

In closing, I want to thank a dear friend and 10-year colleague, Brent Gorda, for his contribution to Intel and the Lustre community. He has been a committed and energetic evangelist for Lustre and HPDD for the past 7 years, and we are fortunate to have had him with us at Intel. I look forward to working with him over the next few months as we manage this transition.