Lustre is already in use at the DoE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where it helps eliminate input/output bandwidth bottlenecks and saves users time copying files across hundreds of distributed file systems.

"HP's Lustre implementation on our supercomputer allows us to achieve faster, more accurate analysis," Scott Studham, associate director for advanced computing at PNNL, said in a statement. "This translates into faster time-to-solution and better science for our researchers, who are addressing complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences."

HP SFS is intended for high-performance computing environments and allows applications to see a single file system image, regardless of the number of servers or storage devices connected to it. Using HP's ProLiant servers and StorageWorks disk arrays, the new product offers protection from failures via redundant hardware and fail-over and recovery capabilities.

HP SFS follows on last month's debut of HP StorageWorks' Reference Information Storage System (RISS), an archive and retrieval solution for storing, indexing and rapidly retrieving reference information for grid architectures.

HP SFS is available is available in two configurations, one with StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array storage and another with lower-priced StorageWorks Modular Smart Array storage. HP said it plans to add other storage types as its grid strategy expands.