Sun is buying the open source Lustre File System along with most of the rest of Colorado-based Cluster File System's intellectual property, business assets and people on undisclosed terms for Solaris and Linux, pledging to enhance the parallel cluster file system for multi-vendor Linux boxes.

Sun said in July that it would deliver Lustre on top of its own open source Zettebyte File System (ZFS), which NetApp now claims in a suit infringes seven of its patents.

Lustre is NetApp-threatening. Sun's purchase also screws up HP, Dell and Bull who have been reselling it - not to mention Data Direct Networks, a Thumper storage alternative that depends heavily on Lustre and just filed to IPO.

All things being equal, that means that Panasas, which hails from the same Carnegie Mellon project as Lustre but went the commercial route rather than open source, should be getting some worried knocks on its door from rivals imaging what it will be like waiting for bug fixes from Sun.

Anyway, Sun says it's bent on providing the industry's most complete end-to-end HPC storage solution.

It imagines pairing Lustre's network-centric scalability with its own petascale Constellation architecture to get high-bandwidth and low-latency access to large amounts of data for HPC applications.

Lustre currently powers clusters with tens of thousands of nodes and petabytes of data, delivering what is said to be "groundbreaking" parallel I/O and metadata throughput on many of the world's largest Linux supercomputers, meaning that it's used most in fancy government labs.

It is running in 20% of the top 100 HPC systems and half of the top 30.

The deal is supposed to close October 1. Of course, many Sun acquisitions just disappear into the great void.