With a decent covering of snow on the ground here finally, and the end-of-year holiday season approaching, I’ve been thinking about some homelab maintenance tasks I want to try to knock out. Being thoughtful about maintaining systems is a critically important part of high availability, as I have written about before on the LINBIT blog. This year saw several high-profile worldwide outage incidents that help keep this topic at the front of my mind.
The first task on my end-of-year to-do list is adding a battery to a RAID controller on a server here that will make write caching possible. Possibly a minor to-do item in the grand scheme of things but it will help improve system performance and reliability. For this system, HA isn’t a goal, some downtime is acceptable because the data is strictly internally accessed, but data reliability is vital.
Using a cloud service, for example, Google Drive or something similar is an easy and convenient way for people in an organization to collaborate, but I try to be thoughtful about what we put on “someone else’s hard disk drives” which is one of the uses for this “on-prem” hardware. Not only is there trust involved in turning over data to a service provider, but significant risk if there is a systems compromise.
As mentioned earlier, some high-profile outage incidents this year have drawn more attention to the fragile nature of our digital interconnectedness. Beyond that, the barrage of notifications about “an update to our privacy policy” that service providers seem to put in my Inbox with ever-increasing frequency clues me in to other changes in the digital technology landscape. Sometimes these changes are cautionary and tip me off about opt-outs that I need to be aware of. For example, do you really want your doorbell to share facial recognition information on a semi-public network?
On the one hand, technology is a constant source of wonder and the things that it is making possible, or easier, always has my interest. But trust is a foundational part of a relationship with a technology provider. The barrage of privacy policy updates is an indicator that someone else – a technology provider – is continually redefining the basis of that trust. With each privacy policy update a service provider is telling me that the trust I agreed to a month ago (by continuing to use their service) is not good enough, and that I need to trust them a little bit more. And a little bit more, etc. The relationship can seem one-sided at times.
This is where I get some satisfaction from some of my homelabbing and open source activities. It feels empowering to have the freedom to work with software and hardware without the constraints that working through a service provider can sometimes bring. For example, I recently set up a self-hosted ente instance for my family so that we would no longer hit cloud photo service provider storage limits (and costs).
Besides my own interests in the topic, looking back on 2025, homelabbing was something we were able to acknowledge and write about in an article on the LINBIT blog recently. Speaking to the business side of things, on the surface, a homelab user might not seem like something to focus on. Where are the sales from a homelabbing use case? The homelabber often belies a longer sales cycle or perhaps just one that is not as obvious as the person who downloads your software from their business account and reaches out for some proof-of-concept support.
I’ve seen it enough where someone in a day job is busy with their own productivity to meet the demands of their employment. That person might not have the time during those business hours to explore project interests or platform alternatives. Often the homelab is where these people are kicking the tires of alternative solutions and trying their “what if” experiments. After all, on a computer, it’s much easier, especially with virtualization and containererization, to build anything you want and then just get rid of it if you need to. Unlike plumbing.
Here at LINBIT, again on the business side of things, we try to make it easier for people to try things out, for example, during an evaluation period. Rather than ignoring the homelab (free) users of LINBIT software, our sales team has been reaching out to these users, and asking questions with a genuine interest in learning about setups and intents. It’s been inspiring to learn about what some homelabbers are doing with LINBIT software. Running Kubernetes at home as an alternative to the family NAS? Sure, why not? You can read about this and a Proxmox home use case, for example, in the blog article I linked earlier.
These same (free) users either have day jobs already or if not, they are homelabbing to build experience towards landing that dream day job. Putting our best foot forward with these users hopefully sets up some memory and influence. At the very least, maybe some brand awareness, but also today’s homelabber might be the employee who one day recommends using LINBIT software to their organization because they had a good experience homelabbing it.
Mentioning Kubernetes brings up another topic that has been on my mind, going into the new year. LINBIT has been an HA-focused company since its inception but in the last years we noticed a decided business shift. Now, more than half of our support and development sales relates to our software-defined storage (SDS) solutions. Our SDS platform integrations, such as with CloudStack, Kubernetes, Proxmox VE, and others, have been steadily driving this business increase. The ability to provision storage and hardware in a modular way has been a revolution (or disruptor depending on the generation you identify with) to the storage industry.
In 2024 and 2025, we saw business opportunities around the repatriation trend, where organizations were bringing business assets and deployments back from the cloud to on-premise. It will be interesting to see if recent increases in physical storage and memory prices slow this trend. Will cost increases drive people back to the cloud, or will other considerations, for example, the earlier mentioned concerns around privacy policies, control, and reliability win the day?
Or perhaps a mix. It feels exciting to have a business built around open source software solutions that are flexible, by trying to be hardware agnostic, so that we can help organizations regardless of their deployment location choice.
