Block Storage and Open Source Developments since Nov 2001Â
In November 2021, we celebrated 20 years of LINBIT, and we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on our story. This post takes a detailed and personal look at what inspired the formation of LINBIT and what inspires and drives them still today.
Early Inspiration
Philipp Reisner, the CEO, has been fascinated with computers and technology since his father brought home a new Commodore 64. Philipp consumed the manual and experimented with the computer, studying Electronics and then Computer Science at University.
Philipp became a software engineer and developer fascinated by open-source software. LINUX was a real game-changer because it brought all of his interests to his fingertips. Suddenly, so much seemed possible.
“Why don’t we do this on our own?”
The formation of LINBIT owes a degree of gratitude to a mistakenly sent email; while the future founders were making rough plans and talking about ‘what could be’ between themselves, one of them accidentally sent an email to the CEO of the company for which they were working. Their plans were no longer in the background, and the CEO was not amused, calling them into the office and firing one of the employees.
Before the incident, the founders-to-be had an idea and rough plans, and now they had the motivation. The question “Why don’t we do this on our own?” sparked an epiphany and a straightforward answer. LINBIT was formed, beginning with generic consulting work, with HA clusters and DRBD still to become the force they are today. If you want to dive deeper into the early beginnings of LINBIT feel free to listen into this podcast episode with Philipp Reisner.
Milestones of LINBIT
- Founding of LINBIT HA Solutions Gmbh in 2001 in Vienna, Austria. The key software, DRBD – Distributed Replicated Block Device – was originally Reisner’s thesis for his diploma at the Vienna University of Technology in 1999. Two years later, he co-founded LINBIT to further develop DRBD and high availability technologies.
- Release of DRBD 8:Â In January 2007, LINBIT introduced its active-active clustering capability, allowing simultaneous write access to two cluster nodes.
- Release of DRBD Proxy in 2007: offering real-time disaster recovery for enterprise businesses mission critical data.
- LINBIT multiplied: In 2008, LINBIT USA was founded in Tualatin, Oregon, to cover the North, Central, and South American markets with development, consultancy, 24/7 support, and OEM/ISV integration services.
- Linux Kernel integration: Since 2010, DRBD has been officially integrated into the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds.
- One million DRBD downloads: reaching this milestone is the main reason for LINBIT’s expansion in the Software-Defined Storage, cloud, and container services.
- Launch of LINSTOR: In 2018, LINBIT launched the open-source storage platform, designed to manage block storage devices for large Linux server clusters.
- IOPS World Record Holder: In February 2020, LINSTOR achieved 14.8 million IOPS in a hyper-converged storage performance test. It significantly outperformed Microsoft’s 13.7 IOPS and Storpool’s 13.8 IOPS. These results are for 3-way synchronous replication using DRBD in a hyper-converged setup. The test cluster consists of 12 servers, each running eight instances of the benchmark, making 96 instances.
- Launch of LINBIT VSANÂ in 2020: A new platform that provides ease of installation for hyper-converged infrastructure while offering data locality and hypervisors’ replication.
Open Source
The Open Source Community has been a long-standing inspiration for the founders since they were young. Through studies, HA became an exciting topic upon which critical servers depended.
Feedback from the community was an integral factor behind the foundation of LINBIT. The founders realised that they had feedback. The community inspired them to create, and they continue to create for the community.
Engaging with the open-source community remains LINBIT’s highest interest. GitHub is a two-way street for LINBIT and helps us keeping our software up to its users demands. The company has always been active at European conferences since the early 2000s. Here we represent open source software, push it at conferences, and create valuable and informative content. Conclusively, the community is also a development method that drives every decision.
Future Plans
We believe in the power of the open-source community, and that belief is central to our future. The open-source community drives the product and creates innovation faster, creating much better outcomes for everyone. So our message to the tech industry is that open source is changing the world: jump on it!
