The Time of Hardware RAID Controllers is Over
We recently received a support request from a user who believed that DRBD was causing high I/O latency. We quickly determined that DRBD was not to blame. The customer relied on his favorite hardware vendor for hardware raid controllers on his servers. This particular big-brand hardware raid controller presents the RAID volume as a SCSI […]
Introducing DRBD Proxy version 4
In January 2025, LINBIT® quietly released DRBD Proxy version 4 (or, DRBD Proxy v4, for short). For those who are not familiar with DRBD Proxy, it is a transparent proxy for DRBD® connections that buffers and compresses replicated data between DRBD hosts. It is often used by LINBIT customers who need to replicate their DRBD […]
Upcoming Events & Conferences
I would like to use this newsletter edition to focus on a few upcoming events and conferences. Events have always been important to LINBIT, as I’m sure they are for many companies and people across the open source community, and we have some news to share. Coming up first on March 6-9, LINBIT will be […]
A New Iteration of DRBD-Proxy
The headline in this newsletter edition is that we have finished a new iteration of our DRBD-Proxy product. DRBD-Proxy is an optional component that enables you to run DRBD smoothly over connections with variable bandwidth. It achieves this by providing buffering and compression. DRBD Proxy is typically part of a disaster recovery solution. Version 4 […]
Shared-Nothing High-Availability Architecture with DRBD
You have likely been reading about high availability (HA) everywhere and all the time, which is perhaps fitting for its name. This post will briefly talk about how DRBD® and a complimentary cluster resource manager, such as DRBD Reactor, can help you create a shared-nothing HA cluster. The primary reason that you might want create a shared-nothing […]
Creating OpenShift Persistent Storage with HA & DR Capability by Using LINSTOR
Perhaps storage is not the first thought you have when thinking about adopting a container orchestration solution, such as OpenShift Container Platform. However, if the applications that you might run in containers are stateful, storage is an aspect that you will need to consider at some point. If you have containerized or virtualized applications that […]
LINSTOR GUI Improvements
As we lay out our plans for work on the new features on the DRBD and LINSTOR sides, there are some interesting improvements to share from LINSTOR GUI. First, the views on resource definitions, resources, and volumes were modeled along the data structures, which was not ideal. Now, it has a condensed view that combines […]
Abstracting Block Storage For Hybrid Clouds & Disaster Recovery Planning Using LINSTOR in AWS
Hybrid cloud strategies are critical for businesses seeking flexibility, cost efficiency, and robust disaster recovery (DR) solutions. By leveraging both on-premise data centers and cloud platforms such as AWS, organizations can design systems to meet specific workload demands, while remaining nimble should demand, or disaster, require a change of action. This article will discuss some […]
Load Balanced Replication with DRBD
Along with the ability to encrypt replication traffic, DRBD® version 9.2.6 gives you the ability to load balance replication traffic across multiple TCP sockets1. You can see a demo of the load balancing feature from LINBIT® founder and CEO Philipp Reisner during one of our community meetings. DRBD version 9 has supported replicating data over multiple paths in […]
2024 Reflections
As this is the final newsletter of 2024, I took the opportunity to review all the announcements we made this year. On the DRBD side, we fixed increasingly exotic bugs. That aligns with the observation that customers use it in larger installations and fleet sizes. The biggest we know of has about 8PB storage under […]
