Lustre is an object based, open source, distributed, parallel, clustered file system. It is designed for maximum performance at massive scale that is resource efficient and cost effective, especially with large block sequential IO. Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre delivers a high availability solution that has built in failover capabilities.

Lustre is an object based file system that splits metadata from the data and stores the metadata on the Metadata Servers (MDS) and the actual data in multiple objects on the Object Storage Servers (OSS). When a client opens a file, Lustre gets the access permissions & other pertinent metadata from the MDS, and after that all the I/O happens between the client and the OSTs. This is unlike other file systems which require going thru a single head node. Lustre allows multiple clients to access multiple OSS nodes at the same time independent of one another, thereby allowing the aggregate system to scale throughput by adding additional nodes in parallel.