A new file system from IBrix Inc. could help unite commodity storage components and high-performance computing. The IBrix Fusion software lets customers scale computing and storage capacity in a clustered computing environment.

While government, research, and scientific organizations are the primary users of Linux clusters for applications such as weapons testing and seismic drilling, business customers are increasingly looking at Linux clusters to increase scalability. The Fusion file system supports these efforts, by including parallelism with multinode byte-level locking, and a Logical Volume Manager that lets customers create a single pool composed of multiple storage devices. High-availability functionality includes active server-to-server failover, and Dynamic Load Balancing lets customers re-provision capacity to the most needy apps.

"Thanks to a file system like IBrix, commodity component clusters could communicate in real time with multiple computers, with intelligence and performance, with millions of files and no slowing down," says Tony Asaro, analyst and lab director at IT market research firm Enterprise Strategy Group. "The data center of the future is changing."