Members of the LINBIT® team will speak at the 2026 Open Tech Day conference, focused on the latest storage technologies, particularly open source ones, that help people manage and scale data. Because they are intrinsically linked with data, the conference also touches on topics such as cloud, virtualization, containerization, and orchestration technologies.
With long-running activity in the open source storage world, including high availability (HA), software-defined storage (SDS), and disaster recovery (DR) solutions, LINBIT is a natural fit here. LINBIT CEO and DRBD® creator, Philipp Reisner, LINSTOR® for Kubernetes lead developer, Moritz Tanner, and LINBIT Solutions Architect, Yusuf Yildiz, will each present at the conference, 1 October, in Nuremberg, Germany.
In the wake of marketplace shake-ups, particularly in the proprietary virtualization software sector, or in the quest for digital sovereignty, many enterprises are seeking or have already moved to open source options for orchestrating containers and virtual machines (VMs), for building their own clouds, or just generally taking back control of their data. An open source solution gives users the peace of mind that the solution cannot be taken away from them. Users are free to “fork” the solution if they need to, host it on their own equipment, customize the solution based on their needs, inspect the codebase to vet for quality or security vulnerabilities, and enjoy other freedoms that proprietary software users do not have.
The LINBIT commitment to open source
Open source has been a pillar of LINBIT software development for over 20 years, beginning with the LINBIT flagship software for facilitating highly available data and applications, DRBD®. More recently, LINBIT developers have built upon this foundation with other open source software such as LINSTOR, DRBD Reactor for HA cluster resource management, LINSTOR Gateway for creating highly available NFS, iSCSI, or NVMe-oF targets, and more. LINBIT even has a Windows-based solution: LINBIT SDS for Windows.
The 2026 Open Tech Day conference
Software-defined storage is the theme of the 2026 Open Tech Day conference, 1 October. LINSTOR is the LINBIT-developed open source SDS solution that manages and orchestrates the DRBD data replication and block storage resource lifecycle in HA and DR clusters. LINSTOR has plugins that integrate it natively with platforms such as CloudStack, OpenNebula, OpenStack, Oracle Virtualization, Proxmox VE, Xen Orchestra, and others. LINSTOR integrates easily with Kubernetes, and Kubernetes-based platforms such as OpenShift, by using an Operator rather than a plugin. By using the Operator, you can deploy LINSTOR in a Kubernetes cluster in two commands.
Advanced lifecycle management for storage in Kubernetes clusters
Kubernetes is a robust and long-lived (in software years) open source platform that has become the backbone for many enterprises. Moritz Tanner, LINSTOR in Kubernetes Lead Developer, will present on the topic of using Cluster API, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) production-ready project, with LINSTOR in Kubernetes. In particular, with Cluster API, you can manage your Kubernetes clusters similarly to how you manage your Kubernetes workloads, that is, declaratively.
By integrating LINSTOR in Kubernetes with Cluster API, LINSTOR can be “smart” about how it manages and carries out lifecycle tasks such as migrating workloads and storage volumes. This way, LINSTOR can work harmoniously with Cluster API, so as not to disrupt storage or data availability during cluster-wide activities such as updating, removing, or creating nodes.
Avoiding data loss: an overview of DRBD and LINSTOR
LINBIT CEO and DRBD creator, Philipp Reisner, will give a foundational presentation on the roles of DRBD and LINSTOR in HA clusters, and cover technical details about their internal workings. The presentation will cover performance, hyperconverged compared with disaggregated architectures, using the RDMA transport for data replication, and storage resource consumption.
A case study in upstreaming customer-driven solutions
Finally, LINBIT Solutions Architect, Yusuf Yildiz, will present on the topic of contributing solutions to the larger open source community. Yildiz’s talk focuses on recent LINBIT development work around using IPv6 and the user-space NFS implementation, NFS-Ganesha, in Kubernetes. Rather than keeping improvements in-house, Yildiz helped lead efforts to contribute improvements to upstream projects. Yildiz will discuss the reasoning and the benefits of taking a community-focused approach.
Conclusion
More enterprises are adopting open source platforms such as Kubernetes, for cost savings, to avoid vendor lock-in, for digital sovereignty, and other reasons. The LINBIT team’s software development continues to keep pace with advances in this and other platforms while helping to protect data within them through its proven storage software such as DRBD, LINSTOR, and related tools. The LINBIT team’s presence at conferences, particularly those within the open source community, such as Open Tech Day, not only showcases the team’s latest developments, but also reinforces the team’s dedication to learning from and collaborating with the community.
You can learn more about the 1 October, 2026 Open Tech Day conference and its agenda at the Open Tech Day website.
