Whamcloud announced a support agreement with Alces Software Limited, an HPC Software and Integration Services Company based in Oxfordshire, England. Alces focuses on HPC clusters and high performance storage and is committed to developing, promoting and supporting open-source software in HPC in the UK and Europe.

"Working with Whamcloud delivers an instant value add to our Lustre customers. We try to stay vendor neutral, like Whamcloud, so our hardware configurations have included HP, Dell, IBM, Supermicro, LSI and DotHill with a range of different interconnect vendors. 'No vendor lock-in' is a major advantage for our customers," said Wil Mayers, CTO at Alces Software "Although we work a lot with academic institutions and national labs, we're increasingly seeing take-up of Lustre for commercial customers, particularly in engineering and bio-technology customers in these territories. Working with Whamcloud means customers are guaranteed the best support options possible, whatever hardware vendor they choose."

"We're very excited to be working with Alces. They have a long history of supporting Linux clusters and have a great use-what-works attitude that fits customers' needs perfectly. Both fully open-source and hybrid solutions available mean they are not pushing one platform. This flexibility is desired by our growing base of Lustre customers," said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud. "Flexible, experienced, and focused on high quality solutions: Alces is a great partner to work with."

Alces and Whamcloud are providing Level 3 support for a leading pharmaceutical company in Sweden. The customer has a large new compute cluster based on Dell blades with a Mellanox Infiniband interconnect and needed high performance storage to go with it. They traditionally have used mostly open-source software, so Lustre was the logical choice for them with the reassurance of a commercial support contract. Alces was chosen because they could demonstrate existing Lustre systems based on Dell hardware, including the failover support needed for the customer's high productivity environment. The servers are pre-built in the UK and then reassembled in Sweden with the compute cluster for acceptance testing. Since the customer's support team was using Lustre since version 1, Alces also delivered a refresher training course outlining new Lustre features and the failover environment.

Alces chose Whamcloud because of Whamcloud's commitment to the open-source Lustre community, ongoing support of the future roadmap and extremely favorable experiences with Whamcloud engineers. The customer is hoping to extend their storage system in the next 6-12 months to enhance both their capacity and metadata performance.

Whamcloud and Alces will be at ISC11, June 20-22, in Hamburg, Germany. Whamcloud will be demonstrating Lustre technologies in booth #843.