Just in the last few months, LINBIT® closed with the help of Red Hat a deal with a large, well-known retail and commercial bank with branches across England and Wales. Since 2019, LINBIT has seen a growing interest from banks and the financial sector in our open source products. A bank operating in the UK changed its High Availability solution from Veritas Volume Replicator to LINBIT HA. Here you get all the relevant information about how what and why!
Background
A long time ago, financial institutions ran a high number of internal data-processing services and the IT department created blueprints, or standard architectures, showing how services should be deployed.
At that time, servers were running Sun Solaris or IBM’s AIX operating system. Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) – or sometimes Volume Replicator (VVR) – was the software used to keep these servers up and running.
Fast forward to 2019. Most new services get deployed on Linux, namely Red Hat’s enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL was swapped in for the operating system, the cluster stack to form HA-clusters remained unchanged (VCS and VVR).
With Red Hat already having an OS in the stack, they use this opportunity to promote their own answer to HA clustering. Under the name “High Availability Add-On”, Red Hat brings the open source Pacemaker technology to customers, which is their replacement for VCS.
DRBD replaces VVR
In some cases, VCS is deployed with VVR. This is where LINBIT’s HA comes in. It acts as a replacement for VVR, and is perfectly integrated with Pacemaker in technical terms and in terms of support. Red Hat and LINBIT combined their support forces via TSANet, which gives customers a seamless support experience in a multi-vendor relationship.
LINBIT also knows all there is to know about Pacemaker since it is the defacto standard HA cluster manager in the open source community. When a customer in this context sends us a question related to Pacemaker we simply answer it instead of referring them to Red Hat.Â
Additionally the TCO costs of the DRBD® solution are by far cheaper than with VCS and VVR. And the bank can rely on the 24 x 365 remote support. There is no vendor lock-in, because it is open source.
This big bank in Great Britain chose LINBIT HA with the help of Redhat and there are very happy about it.
The LINBIT solution is a great piece in our internal infrastructure pushing the system to the next level – the performance, stability, and support is outstanding. Those guys deliver.
– Mark –
Chief Technology Officer
This is not the end…
A bank’s business is money, but that does not mean that the organization wants to spend more than necessary on its IT infrastructure. LINBIT’s DRBD is an effective solution to keep the highly available services reliable as they should be and gain more room to maneuver for investments into emerging technologies.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected]
