Future releases to be made public without delay

Seattle, WA. (November 16, 2005) – Cluster File Systems™, Inc. (CFS), the leader in high-performance parallel file systems, this week released the latest update to the open source Lustre™ file system. Lustre version 1.4.5, available to CFS customers since August 2005, is now available to the general public at no cost.

Furthermore, CFS has substantially accelerated its release policy to advance the adoption of Lustre in the free software community. While Lustre has always been available to customers under an open source license, CFS announces that future versions will be released to customers and the general public simultaneously. Community users will no longer need to wait for access to the newest open source Lustre software.

“CFS is profitable, we’re growing, and we’re absolutely committed to open source,” wrote Phil Schwan, CEO of Cluster File Systems, in an email to users. “This announcement further demonstrates our desire to provide quality advanced software to the free software community.”

In addition to another year of maturity, Lustre 1.4.5 delivers many improvements over the previous publicly available version, including:

• production-quality clients and servers on Linux 2.6
• support for PowerPC architectures, and mixed-endian clusters
• support for Mellanox and Voltaire Infiniband
• support for multiple network interfaces in a single node
• cluster-wide consistent mmap I/O
• support for clusters of more than 5,000 nodes and 400 I/O servers
• disk file system improvements for faster, more consistent I/O
• SNMP integration

The next version of Lustre, to be released in late December, will add:

• support for Silverstorm Infiniband and Myrinet (GM)
• user and group disk quotas
• extended attributes
• POSIX access control lists

Lustre has been selected by agencies such as the US Departments of Energy and Defense, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the French Atomic Energy Commission, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in addition to market leaders in life sciences, digital video, oil and gas, internet services, aerospace, manufacturing, and other commercial HPC environments.

The Lustre file system is a complete software solution, and users are free to deploy it on the hardware and storage of their choice. Customers have chosen integrated solutions from Bull, Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Linux Networx, SGI, and Sun Microsystems, using storage from DataDirect Networks, Engenio, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, Sun, and others. CFS provides enterprise-quality support, training, and other professional services to partners and end users.

To download Lustre 1.4.5, please visit http://www.clusterfs.com/download.html

About Cluster File Systems, Inc.

Cluster File Systems, Inc. (CFS) has quickly established itself as the recognized leader in high-performance, scalable cluster file system technology. The company's premier Lustre cluster file system currently powers clusters with thousands of nodes and hundreds of terabytes of data, delivering groundbreaking parallel I/O and metadata throughput on some of the world's largest supercomputers. CFS provides Lustre technical support, training, and engineering services, and is actively working with storage and cluster vendors to develop the next generation of intelligent storage devices. The Lustre file system for Linux is Open Source software developed and maintained by CFS. For more information, see http://www.clusterfs.com

Look for Cluster File Systems, Inc at Supercomputing 2005 in Seattle, Washington from November 14 - 18, 2005 at Booth 662.

Lustre, the Lustre logo, Cluster File Systems, and CFS are trademarks of Cluster File Systems, Inc. in the United States. All other names are property of their respective owners.