Lustre is built to last according to The Lustre Collective

The Lustre Collective aka TLC joined the recent IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley last week and it was a key session to understand the mission and direction of the new entity as it was founded just before SC25 last November.

TLC is a newly formed company created to ensure the long-term innovation, stability, and relevance of the Lustre parallel file system, one of the most widely deployed storage technologies in HPC, enterprise AI, and large-scale data infrastructure. Launched publicly at Supercomputing 2025, TLC is founded by long-time Lustre leaders and original developers who have collectively driven Lustre’s architecture, evolution, and community releases for more than two decades. Their goal is to provide independent, expert stewardship focused solely on Lustre’s future.

Lustre itself has a 25-year history and remains the dominant parallel filesystem for demanding workloads, powering a majority of the world’s top supercomputers and large AI systems. According to data highlighted in the presentation, Lustre is used by over 60% of the Top 100 HPC systems and underpins exascale machines and large commercial AI deployments, including systems operated by NVIDIA, national laboratories, and hyperscalers. Its longevity is attributed to its open-source, vendor-neutral GPLv2 license, symmetric bandwidth, linear scalability, POSIX compliance, and proven reliability at extreme scale. 

TLC was formed in response to structural gaps in the Lustre ecosystem. While many vendors and cloud providers actively contribute to Lustre, development priorities are often shaped by individual commercial interests. TLC positions itself as a neutral, independent organization that works across vendors, hyperscalers, research institutions, and enterprises to identify and address shared long-term needs of the Lustre community. Unlike venture-backed startups, TLC is not pursuing acquisition or IPO strategies; instead, it operates more like a permanent engineering collective, reinvesting revenue directly into Lustre development and expertise. 

Technically, Lustre continues to evolve to meet modern AI and cloud demands. The platform delivers industry-leading performance, supporting tens of terabytes per second of throughput, hundreds of millions of IOPS, tens of thousands of clients, and hundreds of thousands of GPUs. As illustrated in the architecture diagrams, Lustre provides fully parallel data and metadata paths, flexible use of HDD, QLC/TLC NVMe, and client-side NVMe caching, multi-rail RDMA networking, and protocol re-export via NFS, SMB, and S3 gateways. Security features include strong authentication, encryption, and fine-grained multi-tenant isolation. 

TLC’s roadmap focus includes accelerating Lustre’s transition toward greater resilience, usability, and cloud readiness. Near-term development areas include erasure-coded files, undelete/trash functionality, fault-tolerant management services, client-side compression, GPU peer-to-peer RDMA, and improved recovery mechanisms. Longer-term priorities include metadata redundancy, metadata writeback caching, enhanced multi-tenancy, easier quality-of-service controls, and modernized tooling and monitoring. 

The Lustre Collective monetizes through services rather than licensing, offering consulting, production support, feature development, performance tuning, training, and deployment assistance. Overall, TLC positions itself as a trusted partner for enterprises, hyperscalers, appliance vendors, and research institutions, working to ensure that Lustre remains the definitive data foundation for exascale HPC, enterprise AI, and large-scale distributed computing for decades to come.