NAS High Availability Using a Synology NAS Appliance & LINBIT Software
Recently I came across Synology’s spin on high availability. After perusing through their documentation I noticed an all too familiar protocol: DRBD®. Recognizing this software and having a recent desire to tinker a bit, I picked up two DS224+ hardware storage appliances, one of their least expensive models. LINBIT® is no stranger to assisting companies implement high availability […]
Highly Available SCST & LIO iSCSI Clustering How-To Guide Update & Comparison
Companion Tech Guide Updated using Community Feedback on 3/21/24 LINBIT®️ has been building and supporting Highly Available (HA) iSCSI clusters using DRBD®️ and Pacemaker for over a decade. We recently updated our HA iSCSI how-to guides for RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 to include instructions for both the Linux-IO (LIO) and SCSI Target Subsystem for […]
Migrating Manually Created DRBD Resources to LINSTOR Software-Defined Storage
DRBD® has been a long-standing and proven solution for creating high-availability (HA) storage. LINSTOR®, the LINBIT®-developed software-defined storage (SDS) solution, is a relatively newer offering. You can use LINSTOR to make managing storage easier, and it pairs seamlessly with DRBD behind the scenes. LINSTOR also integrates with many platforms such as Kubernetes, CloudStack, Docker, OpenNebula, […]
The Continuous Increase in GDPR Conflicts with the Spirit of Open Source
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 […]
Apache CloudStack as a VMware Alternative: A Deep Dive into CloudStack Features Anticipating VMware Migration
The Apache CloudStack Project is observing a significant interest from Cloud Service Providers, who are looking for a VMware alternative after the VMware Broadcom acquisition and the announcement of significant changes in the VMware Partner Connect Program, licensing models and VMware pricing.
How Yellowbrick Data Contributed to Improving LINBIT Open Source Software
One of the reasons that LINBIT® uses an open source licensing model1 for nearly all of the software that LINBIT developers create is because the open source model encourages collaboration and engagement with users, in a way that closed source software does not. With open source software, the software code is freely available for anyone […]
A Risky Move for Broadcom + Another Win for Open Source
Happy New Year! We will rock 2024, improving high availability and high-performance data storage on Linux. In the coming year, I look forward to doing more work on the RDMA code in DRBD, seeing LINSTOR reach 2.0, bringing an overhauled API, and providing better interactive feedback for long-running operations. I have more plans and projects […]
Using VDO with DRBD on RHEL 9
This blog will provide installation and configuration instructions for implementing Red Hat’s Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) and LINBIT®’s DRBD®. VDO is a virtual block device driver that provides inline deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning for block storage in Linux. VDO operates within the Linux kernel and is managed by LVM. DRBD is a virtual block […]
Comparing LINSTOR & Ceph Storage Clusters
Over the many years that I’ve worked for LINBIT®, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been asked, “How does a LINSTOR® (or DRBD®) cluster compare to a Ceph storage cluster?” Hopefully I can help answer that question in this blog post for anyone who might Google this in the future. My short answer could […]
Using a Cluster Resource Manager and DRBD to Minimize System Maintenance Downtime
Besides helping to make your applications and services highly available, one of the lesser known benefits of using DRBD® is using it to help minimize downtime when you are doing system maintenance. Another blog post gives some background and an example workflow for this use case. For simplicity, that blog post only provides an overview of technical […]
