LINBIT is the company behind DRBD, an open-source distributed and replicated storage system. LINBIT SDS is the company’s commercial offering, leveraging DRBD, LINSTOR, and other open-source technologies to create a software-defined distributed storage system focused on cloud-native applications, but that is also available for other orchestration platforms like OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula, oVirt, Proxmox VE, and XCP-ng.
The storage solution is highly focused on performance optimization, minimizing the compute and memory footprint. Its direct integration into Linux with a kernel module reduces latency and resource consumption. It includes asynchronous and synchronous data replication, snapshotting, delta shipping (to other clusters or remote S3 buckets), and data reduction.
The solution’s architecture makes volumes accessible on every cluster node, and its integration with Kubernetes means it can change the R/W node for each volume depending on pod (re)scheduling. It is topology-aware and actively co-locates data with container workloads. LINBIT SDS is deployed as a collection of microservices. A controller manages the cluster configuration and resources. The satellite manages the creation, modification, and deletion of storage resources on each node. The storage layer is implemented as a kernel driver, several userspace management applications, and some shell scripts. Its support for ARM and other processor architectures is interesting for certain edge deployments.
