In the coming month, there are two events that our team will be attending. The first event is STAC (Strategic Technology Analysis Center). STAC’s research helps players in the finance industry discover and assess technology. LINBIT team members have been to the spring event before and are looking forward to our second appearance at STAC on the 9th of November in London.
Secondly, on November 23-24, you can find us at the 2023 CloudStack Collaboration Conference. We are proud to be an official sponsor of the event, which is ‘the’ event for open source enthusiasts. You can register here.
You can also explore the full speaker schedule, and while doing so, keep an eye out for LINBIT presentations. Rene Peinthor will present ‘Updates on the LINSTOR Driver for CloudStack’ on the Thursday, and I will also be speaking, providing a ‘DRBD deep dive’ on the Friday morning. I will cover questions like which hardware to select, how to tune DRBD for maximal performance, what to consider when laying out meta-data, and other related topics.
If travelling to London or Paris is not in the cards for you, you can still stay up-to-date on LINBIT news via some of our recent blog posts. Multisite Data Replication Over a WAN for Disaster Recovery explores the potential of tools like Booth, DRBD, and DRBD Proxy to extend the capabilities of Pacemaker for multisite disaster recovery.
Additionally, “Operation Excellence”: How LINSTOR is Redefining Military Data Storage looks at how LINSTOR combats the complex, technical challenges of implementing SDS in military operations.
Regarding software updates, we are in the DRBD release process. On the 24th, I shared the drbd-9.1.17-rc.2 and drbd-9.2.6-rc.2 release, which took a bit longer this time – around ten weeks. For me, this was a fascinating development cycle, bringing new features like TLS encryption and full load-balancing support over multiple paths with a new TCP transport implementation. In parallel to those new features, there are fixes to the RDMA transport, making it compatible with Mellanox Connect-X6 cards (with some settings). As usual, our automated tests and the CI pipeline was an awesome tool that guided us through the entire development process.
Some of the minor updates in the python-linstor/linstor-client 1.20.1 release include the client being able to now set the controller/satellite log level.
Finally, there are more updates in the linstor-server 1.25.0 release, including limits on parameters for error-reports list queries and the ability to report the total count of error-reports without having to fetch their header data. These updates should vastly improve the prometheus /metrics queries and eliminate 10s timeout errors in the logs. The most outstanding improvement of this release is that from now on LINSTOR will correctly recognize when DRBD detaches from a backing storage device (SSD) due to a disk failure. Up until now, DRBD was shielding the application from that failure, and LINSTOR would try to re-attach the failed disk to DRBD. Of course, that does not help. From now on, you will see such volumes marked with the “skip-disk” property.
