When the EU introduced the GDPR, I initially thought that ‘rights for individuals’ could only be positive. Deleting an individual’s data upon request is something we can easily do in a small organization like LINBIT.
Now, sometime later, I feel another consequence of the GDPR is emerging. The GDPR rules consider every e-mail address as personal data. As such, you need to protect them. Welcome to the world of SCC, the Standard Contractual Clauses.
Every new customer large enough to have a legal department aware of this screens future suppliers for what data they might process. So far, we at LINBIT have asked our customers to register the e-mail addresses of all employees who should have the right to open support tickets with LINBIT.
Do you see the catch? LINBIT must now process personal data, much like your health insurance company. Setting up all the contract work (SCCs) with our cloud providers, who host four virtual machines for us, takes considerable time. To streamline the process with new customers, we agreed that the customer would name us function-based e-mail addresses instead of personal e-mail addresses, like [email protected].
As we feel the pain of the GDPR unfolding with a bit of time delay, I am increasingly concerned about the upcoming CRA, Cyber Resilience Act, which I feel conflicts with the spirit of Open Source licensing.
Over the years, the EU has put more of an emphasis on regulation. Years ago, there was already a significant gap of 35000 to 100 when comparing the setup of a GmbH in Austria vs. an LLC in the US. That gap continues to widen. The EU has mastered the art of regulation. While there are positive aspects, the continuous increase in regulations is concerning.
As we adapt to new regulations, we will continue to deliver open-source software while sharing our knowledge base. With that in mind, let us switch to lighter topics:
On the 18th, we held the first LINBIT Community Meeting of 2024. Topics included ‘Restoring quorum after reboot of a degraded 3-node cluster,’ ‘LINBIT SDS + Cloudstack updates,’ ‘Storage Pool Mixing,’ ‘Operator V2,’ ‘Helm deployments,’ and ‘Prometheus integration.’
Beyond what we shared in our community meeting, the team has been productive regarding new content since my last newsletter. Deploying a Highly Available NFS Cluster on RHEL 9 with DRBD Reactor is a YouTube introduction to one of our popular tech guides. The tech guide takes people through setting up and configuring a high-availability (HA) NFS three-node cluster using DRBD® and DRBD Reactor.
Have you ever wondered how a LINSTOR® (or DRBD®) cluster compares to a Ceph storage cluster? If so, you are not alone. We receive this question often. Both offer resilient storage, have operators for deploying Kubernetes, upstream OpenStack drivers, snapshotting and disaster recovery capabilities, and are fully open source. However, there are differences. Check out our blog post, Comparing LINSTOR & Ceph Storage Clusters, for our take.
Our team recently published a blog post titled, Using VDO with DRBD on RHEL 9, which provides installation and configuration instructions for implementing Red Hat’s Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) and LINBIT’s DRBD. In addition, we have shared a case study titled, How Yellowbrick Data Contributed to Improving LINBIT Open Source Software, highlighting the benefits of Open Source.
The final blog post I want to share in this newsletter is Apache CloudStack as a VMware Alternative: A Deep Dive into CloudStack Features Anticipating VMware Migration. It’s a guest post by Marco Sinhoreli from ShapeBlue, with an additional focus on the combination of Apache CloudStack and LINBIT SDS.
Regarding software updates, WinDRBD 1.1.9 contains many fixes for corner cases. Usually, you shouldn’t be affected by those, so there is no urgent need to upgrade if you have a running WinDRBD instance. Feel free to check the link above for more details.
For the additions, changes, and fixes to python-linstor/linstor-client 1.21.0, visit the link. We also released linstor-server 1.26.0. This release has one highlight feature: BalanceResourcesTask. There is now a recurring Linstor task that tries to keep your set place-count from the resource-group to all resources belonging to this group.
