Acquisition of the cluster file system will help Sun to strengthen its position with respect to high-performance computers and to market its own Solaris operating system in combination with the Lustre filesystem. The high-performance Lustre filesystem is designed for thousands of hardware nodes and Petabyte scale memory. Lustre was released by its owners as an Open Source software under the GPL.

"This acquisition, coupled with the recent announcement of the Sun Constellation System, the most open petascale capable HPC architecture in the industry, shows our long-term commitment to the open source community and leadership in HPC," says John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun published plans to offer Lustre servers on the Solaris ZFS platform as early as July. Thanks to the latest acquisition, Sun now possesses the know-how to bundle memory virtualization solutions with its own operating system. Sun's plans for Lustre include extending Lustre for Linux and Solaris OS on various hardware platforms. Peter Braam, Chief Executive Officer CEO of Cluster File Systems sees a promising basis for cooperation: "We have already worked together to deliver several large clusters, for example the fastest supercomputer in Asia at Tokyo Tech and we're now in the process of installing a 500+ TeraFlop and 1.7 PetaByte cluster at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)."

The deal is due for completion in early October at the start of Sun's second fiscal quarter. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, but according to a statement by Sun, they will not affect share dividends.