Open Source VMware Alternatives That Can Integrate With LINBIT Storage Solutions
This article contains content contributions from LINBIT® team members: solutions architects Matt Kereczman and Joel Zhou, CEO Philipp Reisner, and developer Moritz Wanzenböck. If the Broadcom VMware acquisition negatively impacts you, you might be looking around for possible VMware alternatives, especially if you have customers who are also affected. Or maybe you have not been […]
LVM, LVM-thin, or ZFS
Since LINSTOR supports LVM, LVM-thin, and ZFS, we often get questions about which of the above lower-level storage virtualization technologies we recommend. The answer is, as usual, it depends on your requirements. If you only look for performance, no matter which features are available, the answer is LVM (traditional). If you want to have snapshots […]
Discover Our Approach to Events & Conferences
I led a few discussions last year based on how valuable events and conferences were to us. While I have always appreciated the opportunity to connect with our clients and present our software at events, you have to balance that with the outcomes. I am a big fan of “in person”. While deals don’t normally […]
DRBD Client (Diskless Mode) Performance
Introduction This blog post will examine the performance of DRBD® in diskless mode. DRBD version 9.0 introduced a feature that is now used in nearly all LINSTOR® integrated clusters: DRBD diskless attachment, otherwise known as DRBD clients. With this feature, you can have a DRBD node which has no local replica itself. Essentially, the client node […]
Bringing a LINSTOR Driver to Incus
In my last newsletter, I mentioned the growing burden of maintaining all the integrations for LINSTOR with various workload orchestrators. When the open-source community creates an integration driver, that not only takes that burden off my team but also implies that the community perceives LINSTOR as an accepted open-source storage solution. Incus is a workload […]
Exploring LINBIT Software Relationships for Building Resilient, Scalable, & Integrated Data Storage Solutions
LINBIT® has been a player in the world of highly available storage and data replication since 2001. At the heart of the LINBIT software ecosystem are DRBD® and LINSTOR®, two technologies that provide a foundation for building resilient, scalable, and integrated storage solutions. What makes LINBIT storage software truly powerful and unique is flexibility. I […]
Documenting a LINSTOR Automatic Resource Placement Feature: Ensuring a Number of Resources on Nodes of a Different Type
In this article, I will explore the LINSTOR® –x-replicas-on-different feature, and my efforts to document the feature for the LINSTOR User Guide. This was an incredible journey. An alternative title to this article might have been “Documentation Adventures in LINSTOR-land”. The –x-replicas-on-different feature, introduced with LINSTOR server version 1.28.0 and LINSTOR client version 1.23.0, expands on the automatic resource placement […]
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 […]
