What’s the Difference Between Off-Site Data Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR)?
Many businesses make the mistake of confusing “Disaster Recovery” (DR) with “off-site data backup.” Confusing the two may lead to paying a high price in the form of data loss and downtime when a disaster hits. Off-site backups are a necessary part of business continuity in the face of disaster for nearly any organization, but […]
Multi-AZ Replication Using Automatic Placement Rules in LINSTOR
Multi-AZ Replication Are you looking to leverage multiple availability zones in Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure? LINSTOR® can easily manage your block storage and automatically replicate your data between availability zones (AZs). This post explores multi-AZ replication using automatic placement rules in LINSTOR. This blog post illustrates the advantages of using LINSTOR’s lesser-known […]
Benchmarking DRBD
We often see people on #drbd or on drbd-user trying to measure the performance of their setup. Here are a few best practices to do this. First, a few facts. What you want to do: Some problems we’ve seen: If you’re doing all that correctly, and are using a recent DRBD version, for a pure random-write […]
TLS Security in the LINSTOR SDS & Piraeus Kubernetes Operator
LINSTOR® has featured TLS and SSL security for some time. This security is for communication between the LINSTOR nodes and the client to the API. However, implementing this was not trivial. If you want to see the nitty-gritty details, peep a snapshot of the LINSTOR User’s Guide on the Wayback Machine before March 2022. The […]
Solutions for Microservice Architectures
Over the past few years, microservice architectures and the cloud practices surrounding them have proliferated throughout the IT industry. As someone practicing IT in the early 2000s, the container revolution is reminiscent of when VM infrastructure became the new normal. With any major shift in IT architectures, new and old software finds new use cases, […]
20 Years of LINBIT
Block Storage and Open Source Developments since Nov 2001 In November 2021, we celebrated 20 years of LINBIT, and we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on our story. This post takes a detailed and personal look at what inspired the formation of LINBIT and what inspires and drives them still today. Early Inspiration […]
DRBD Reactor – Prometheus
This blog post discusses the ‘Prometheus’ plugin, which implements a prometheus.io compatible metrics endpoint. But, first, for a more general introduction to ‘drbd-reactor,’ please read the overview blog post. Motivation Proper monitoring of DRBD® resources has been a messy task for too long. There are various monitoring solutions, and as DRBD is widely used, there are plugins/agents/importers that […]
DRBD Reactor – User Mode Helper (UMH)
This blog post discusses the User Mode Helper (UMH) plugin. Read the overview blog post first for a more general introduction to drbd-reactor. Motivation Experienced DRBD® users will know that DRBD (the part in the Linux kernel) can call user-defined helper scripts if several important events happen, like before a resource becomes a sync target. Such a […]
Multi Availability Zone Block-Level Replication using DRBD
Reader Bootstrapping Amazon Web Services (AWS) is designed from the ground up with availability in mind. The geographical locations of their Availability Zones (AZs) are carefully selected to mitigate the risk of natural disasters that could impact their services. Even the most unexpected natural disaster is unlikely to affect all of a region’s AZs. However, […]
DRBD Reactor – Design & Features
Over time, LINBIT® has built a variety of software components for use in highly-available systems. These components range from DRBD® for block device replication to LINSTOR®, our SDS solution, to various plugins/scripts integrating DRBD into Pacemaker, OpenStack, OpenNebula, Proxmox, Kubernetes, and more. However, a missing component was a daemon that monitors DRBD events like a resource becoming […]
