Whamcloud has announced a strategic partnership with the European Information Technology company Bull to accelerate the development of open source Lustre storage technology and to ensure that Lustre users have access to the highest level of support and service.

Today Bull and Whamcloud are announcing a joint agreement for Lustre development and contribution of this work back to the community. Other areas of cooperation for Lustre are planned. The ultimate objective is to cooperate on development towards the file system needed for tomorrow's exaflop-scale systems.

"Bull has been integrating Lustre in its Extreme Computing solutions for many years, and our experts are regular contributors to the evolution of the Lustre file system. Whamcloud has gathered some of the top talents of the Lustre ecosystem. This combination of Bull and Whamcloud skills will allow our customers to continue to get the best performance out of Lustre, while being assured that the file system they chose is fully maintained and supported," said Eric Monchalin, HPC Software Director at Bull.

"Bull is the European leader in Lustre-based storage solutions, and we're obviously excited at the opportunity this partnership represents. Lustre enjoys real popularity in multiple European markets and this furthers our goal of driving IO and storage development worldwide in an open-source, hardware-agnostic environment," said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud.