ARVADA, Colorado – November 9, 2026
The Lustre Collective (TLC), the engineering company founded by veteran Lustre developers to advance Lustre upstream and in the open, today announced a strategic partnership with Do IT Now, the European HPC and AI infrastructure integrator. Together, the two companies will bring TLC's upcoming software-defined Lustre platform to HPC centers, AI factories and research institutions – running on standard servers from any vendor or in the public cloud, and backed by a complete delivery and support chain from the first design workshop to day-to-day operations.
Why this matters
Lustre powers the majority of the world's fastest supercomputers. Yet for most organizations, using Lustre has meant a choice between buying a proprietary storage appliance at a premium, or assembling and operating the stack themselves with scarce in-house expertise. At the same time, GPU and storage hardware have never been more expensive, and everything spent on storage overhead reduces what is spent on compute.
The TLC–Do IT Now partnership removes that trade-off:
Your hardware, your choice. TLC's platform turns standard x86 or Arm servers from any manufacturer into a fully managed, highly available Lustre cluster. It supports shared DAS and NVMe-over-Fabrics storage as well as InfiniBand, Ethernet and RoCE networks. The same software runs on bare metal, in virtual machines and in the public cloud.
Dramatically faster time to production. Operators describe the cluster they want; the platform provisions, configures and monitors it automatically. What used to take a specialist team days or weeks of manual work becomes a repeatable, automated process – so new capacity is ready for users far sooner.
Upgrades in one step, rollback with one command. Operating system, Lustre and drivers ship together as a single tested image. A full-cluster upgrade happens in one coordinated step; if anything is not right, a single command returns the cluster to its previous state.
High availability built in. Cluster-wide failover with fencing replaces fragile failover pairs. During a failover, clients see a pause, not an error.
Open observability, faster support. Metrics, logs and traces stream via OpenTelemetry into the monitoring stack you already run. One command produces a complete support bundle for TLC and Do IT Now engineers.
A transparent, node-based commercial model. Pricing is based on the number of storage servers, not on the capacity stored – so costs stay predictable as data grows, and budget stays available for compute.
What each partner brings
TLC contributes the Lustre engineering: platform development, qualification, third- and fourth-level support and upstream Lustre maintenance. Do IT Now turns the platform into running production systems for AI and GPU clusters, research and HPC centers, and the hardware vendors and cloud providers it works with, covering solution design, hardware selection, installation, first- and second-level support, operations and training. Do IT Now already operates production Lustre environments for industrial and research customers and brings that experience into the qualification of the platform.
Quotes
"Lustre is the fastest way to feed data to large-scale compute – and for too long it has been locked behind either an appliance or a limited pool of experts," said Peter Jones, CEO of The Lustre Collective. "We built our platform, ORE, so that Lustre can be deployed and operated like any other modern infrastructure. Do IT Now brings the part we don't do: designing, delivering and supporting it where the customer is. Together, that makes Lustre an option for a much larger market."
"Peter and his team have done what many of us in the file system world have talked about for years: they have made Lustre something you can deploy and operate with confidence, on the hardware you choose," said Marco Merkel, CEO of Do IT Now Germany. "Having spent much of my career with parallel file systems, I know how rare that is, and I have great respect for their work. Do IT Now will be the hub that brings this to our entire partner network. Whether a project runs on Intel, AMD or Arm CPUs, or on NVIDIA or AMD GPUs, we work with TLC, hardware vendors and our partners to tailor each solution to the customer's applications and support it in operation. For the customer, that means a simple way to engage and get Lustre built around their workloads."
Meet us at SC26
Both companies will be at SC26 in Chicago, November 15–20, 2026:
The Lustre Collective – Booth 2215 (within the Starfish Storage booth)
Do IT Now – Booth 1240
TLC will also present "Advancements in Lustre with TLC and NetApp" at the NetApp booth (November 17) and "Lustre Collaboration With DOE" at the DOE booth (November 18). In addition, TLC will take part in the IO-500 BOF and the OpenSFS Lustre Community BOF (both November 18).
Availability
TLC's software-defined Lustre platform is currently in joint qualification with Do IT Now as its launch partner. Selected customers can take part in early evaluation programs through Do IT Now ahead of general availability, which is planned for the first quarter of 2027. Organizations interested in an evaluation can contact either company.
About The Lustre Collective
The Lustre Collective (TLC) was founded by experienced Lustre engineers to develop Lustre upstream, in the open, and to make it simpler to deploy, operate and support at scale. TLC works with operators, hardware vendors and integrators worldwide to broaden Lustre adoption. TLC is headquartered in Arvada, Colorado. Learn more at thelustrecollective.com.
About Do IT Now Group
Do IT Now Group operates globally providing consulting, installation, optimization, and managed services for High Performance Computing, Quantum Computing, and AI. Supported by 160+ engineers worldwide, Do IT Now delivers services across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments for leaders in manufacturing, automotive, life sciences, pharma, and the energy sectors. Independent of hardware, cloud, and software vendors, Do IT Now also designs and operates high-performance storage, including parallel file systems such as Lustre, for research institutions and the public sector. Do IT Now Germany GmbH is based in Munich. Learn more at doitnowgroup.com.
Media contacts
The Lustre Collective: Peter Jones – pjones@thelustrecollective.com
Do IT Now Germany: Marco Merkel – marco.merkel@doitnowgroup.com
Lustre is a registered trademark of OpenSFS.
