We at LINBIT® are pleased to learn about a collaborative research project between 45drives, a data storage solutions company built on open source, and Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) in Canada.
The college has chosen the top five students in its Systems Management and Security program to investigate using DRBD® and LINSTOR® as a high availability block storage solution for VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and possibly other platforms.
45drives currently uses Ceph as a data replication technology for 45drives’s high availability and clustering solutions portfolio. However, integrating direct block storage replication with VMware ESXi is a gap in that portfolio that Ceph does not fill.
How LINSTOR and DRBD Integrate With Hypervisors
By using LINSTOR, portable virtual machines and containers hosted on ESXi, Hyper-V, and other hypervisors can achieve storage performance by using software-defined storage similar to what is possible by using more expensive SAN or NAS appliances, without sacrificing resilience. The low latency access to storage that you get when using LINSTOR to provide block storage to your hypervisors makes hosting databases, message queues, and other highly transactional applications less of a concern when compared to other software-defined storage solutions that use object (Ceph), or file based storage (NFS).
When your hypervisor is Linux based, you can deploy LINSTOR in a hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) model where direct access to the block storage is possible. If you are not using an HCI model to deploy LINSTOR, because LINSTOR creates standard block devices, you can export those block devices by using standard block transports such as iSCSI. If your hypervisor happens to support the NVMe-oF implementation found in the Linux kernel, you can have even better storage performance by exporting NVMe-oF targets backed by LINSTOR volumes. ESXi, unfortunately, does not support the Linux NVMe-oF specification but Linux based hypervisors such as Proxmox VE certainly do.
LINBIT Open Source Software in Hardware Appliances
Other hardware vendors already use LINBIT-developed open source technologies in their solutions. You can read more about one such use case for high availability in another LINBIT blog post. We are optimistic that the 45drives and NSCC collaboration will help 45drives round out their enterprise solutions portfolio, and that the project will engage the NSCC students with the exciting world of open source.
Back to School
As LINBIT followers might know, its flagship software, DRBD, was born from CEO Philipp Reisner’s academic research as a computer science student at the Technical University in Vienna (TU Wien), more than 20 years ago. Learning should be a lifelong endeavor. We at LINBIT are happy that DRBD is going back to school, this time with its younger sibling, LINSTOR.
More To Come
The NSCC students’ capstone project will run through April 2024 when the students will give a final presentation on their research. We hope to follow up this announcement article with a more in-depth article, after learning about the results of this collaboration.
