LINBIT

LINBIT HA-Solutions GmbhCompany Logo

Industry| Computer Software
Genre| Open Source Software
Founded| 2001
Headquarters| Vienna, Austria

Area served

| Worldwide
Products| LINBIT HA[1], LINBIT DR[2], LINBIT SDS[3], LINBIT VSAN[4], LINBIT OEM[5]
Subsidiaries| LINBIT USA, LLC in Tualatin, OR
Website| https://www.linbit.com

LINBIT HA-Solutions Gmbh is an Austrian multinational software company that provides open-source software products to enterprises. Founded in 2001, LINBIT has its corporate headquarters in Vienna, Austria with a subsidiary (LINBIT USA, LLC) in Tualatin, OR. LINBIT has become associated largely with its distributed replicated storage system for the Linux platform DRBD. The LINBIT product lineup spans from high availability, disaster recovery, software-defined storage, storage replication, virtualization, OEM, cloud data services, flash storage, support to training. LINBIT creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects.

## Contents

* 1 History
* 2 Business model
* 3 Solutions
* 3.1 LINBIT HA
* 3.2 LINBIT DR
* 3.3 LINBIT SDS
* 3.4 LINBIT VSAN
* 3.5 LINBIT OEM
* 3.6 LINBIT TRAINING
* 4 Software
* 4.1 DRBD
* 4.2 LINSTOR
* 4.3 Csync2
* 5 Projects
* 5.1 Piraeus
* 5.2 LINUX foundation
* 5.3 CNCF
* 5.4 Project Lightning
* 5.5 GitHub
* 5.6 LINBIT Slack
* 5.7 LINSTOR Days
* 5.8 Environments
* 5.8.1 Kubernetes
* 5.8.2 OpenSDS project
* 5.8.3 OpenShift
* 5.8.4 OpenNebula
* 5.8.5 OpenStack
* 5.8.6 Proxmox
* 6 Partnerships
* 6.1 Trillio
* 6.2 SUSE
* 6.3 Western Digital
* 6.4 IBM
* 6.5 Intel
* 7 References
* 8 External links

## History

Philipp Reisner founded the company in 2001 in Vienna, Austria. Distributed Replicated Block Device, in short - DRBD, was originally Reisner's thesis for his diploma at the Vienna University of Technology in 1999. The original intention behind DBRD was about storing redundant email messages. However, Reisner quickly realized the full potential of the technology and went ahead in developing it further.[6] In November 2001, he co-founded LINBIT intending to develop DRBD and high availability technologies further.

In 2003, Lars Ellenberg joined the company as a leader of the R&D team, together with Reisner.

In January 2007, DRBD 8 was released, which broke all previous performance barriers and introduced the active-active clustering capability, allowing simultaneous write access to two cluster nodes.

In 2007, DRBD Proxy was released, offering real-time disaster recovery for enterprise businesses mission critical data.

In 2008, LINBIT USA was founded in Tualatin, Oregon, with the purpose to cover the North, Central, and South American markets with development, consultancy, 24/7 support, and OEM/ISV integration services.[7]

Since 2010 DRBD has been officially integrated into the Linux kernel.[8][9]

In 2015, DRBD reached more than 1 million downloads, and it's the main reason for LINBIT expansion in the Software-Defined Storage, cloud, and container services.[10]

In 2018, LINBIT launched the open-source software LINSTOR, designed to manage block storage devices for large Linux server clusters.

In February 2020, LINBIT achieved the IOPS World Record with 14.8 million IOPS in a hyper converged storage performance test. It significantly outperformed Microsoft's 13.7 IOPS and Storpool's 13.8 IOPS. These results are for 3-way synchronous replication using DRBD in a hyper-converged setup. The test cluster consists of 12 servers, each running eight instances of the benchmark, making 96 instances.[11]

In July 2020, LINBIT announced LINBIT VSAN, a new platform that provides ease of installation for hyper-converged infrastructure while offering data locality and hypervisors' replication.[12]

In November 2020, LINBIT announced a partnership with Western Digital to support storage demands for AI technologies.[13]

## Business model

LINBIT operates on a business model based on open-source software, development within a community, professional quality assurance, and subscription-based customer support. LINBIT produces open-source code so that more programmers can make adaptations and improvements. LINBIT sells subscriptions for the support, training, and integration services that help customers in using their open-source software products. Customers pay one set price for unlimited access to LINBIT’s private software repository and up to 24/7 support.

## Solutions

### LINBIT HA

Enterprise support mirroring data among any number of Linux servers in shared-nothing high availability clusters using DRBD.

### LINBIT DR

Complete IT business continuity solution that protects, and restores data, servers, or entire data centers suffering from a natural or man-made disaster.

### LINBIT SDS

Resilient and fast storage solution leveraging Linux’s storage functionalities - based on the software DRBD and LINSTOR. It provisions and manages data storage, independent of the underlying hardware.

LINBIT SDS has been featured as a Market Challenger in two of GigaOM’s annual Market Radars reports for 2020:

1. for Software Defined Storage[14]
2. for Data Storage for Kubernetes[15]

LINBIT SDS can also be purchased on the Red Hat marketplace with Red Hat OpenShift certifications for its key software DRBD and LINSTOR.[16]

### LINBIT VSAN

LINBIT VSAN is a software defined storage solution for small and medium-sized VMware® deployments.

### LINBIT OEM

LINBIT OEM offers all of the solutions mentioned above in a customized integration regarding company-specific needs.

### LINBIT TRAINING

The LINBIT Training is designed to give Linux IT administrators a high level understanding of High Availability and Software Defined Storage setups using DRBD, LINSTOR & Pacemaker.

## Software

### DRBD

Main article: DRBD

DRBD provides block-level data replication via a “virtual” block device. It provides RAID 1 like functionality, but over the network.[17] It is packaged as a combination of an in-kernel block device driver, userspace management applications, and a handful of shell scripts. It has been included in the mainline Linux kernel since 2.6.33.[18]

* Distributed Replicated Storage System

### LINSTOR

LINSTOR is a software that manages replicated volumes across a group of machines. With native integration to Kubernetes, LINSTOR makes building, running, and controlling block storage simple. LINSTOR® is open-source software designed to manage block storage devices for large Linux server clusters. It’s used to provide persistent Linux block storage for cloudnative and hypervisor environments. Historically LINSTOR started as a resource-file generator for DRBD® which conveniently also created LVM/ZFS volumes. By time LINSTOR steadily grew and got new features and drivers in both directions, south-bound like snapshots, LUKS, dm-cache, dm-write cache or nvme, and north-bound drivers for Kubernetes, Openstack, OpenNebula, Openshift, VMware.[19]

* Block Storage Management For Containers

In 2020 LINSTOR got included into the CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape for Cloud Native Storage.[20]

* LINSTOR CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape Listing

### Csync2

Csync2 is a tool for asynchronous file synchronization. It can keep multiple files and directories in sync across multiple nodes. It can also detect file conflicts and handle file deletion. Csync2 was designed with computer clusters and server farms in mind.[21]

## Projects

### Piraeus

Since 2019 Piraeus Datastore[22] offers persistent volumes for Kubernetes cloud applications to its users. It was developed by the LINBIT open-source model and made available for the general public by LINBIT, the open-source community, and Daocloud.[23] Piraeus offers a fast and stable way for users to use the SDS model in Kubernetes using high-performance block storage.[24]

### LINUX foundation

LINBIT is an established long-term member of the LINUX Foundation and an active participant in the SODA project.[25]

### CNCF

LINBIT is a Silver level member of CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.[26][27] Primarily because of DRBD, which is since its offical inclusion into the Linux Kernel well accepted and known in the open source industry and community. LINBIT is a regular participant on CNCF conferences.[28]

### Project Lightning

Project Lightning is the competitive replacement program offered by LINBIT SDS (back then called LINBIT DRBD-SDS) versus Ceph OpenStack Cloud Users.[29]

In 2016 LINBIT SDS was offered as the competitive replacement program offered by LINBIT versus Ceph OpenStack Cloud Users. After a series of benchmark tests by LINBIT engineers, it was discovered that LINBIT SDS could be up to 6x faster than Ceph 10.2.3 while at the same time running on less than 20x CPU power. The most notable results were achieved predominately in small-block size I/O, where most customer applications operate.[30]

### GitHub

All of LINBIT repositories and feature updates can be found on GitHub.[31]

### LINBIT Slack

The official LINBIT Slack channel is the central part of the interaction between open-source enthusiasts, storage specialists, solution architects, and official LINBIT developers.[32]

### LINSTOR Days

Four Days virtual webinar & meeting event first time introduced in October 2020 with speakers from Western Digital, WEDOS Internet, and BayNet Argentina. Attendees have each time the chance to learn about LINBIT's open-source software and can directly interact with LINBIT's developer team in a virtual Q&A meeting.[33]

### Environments

#### Kubernetes

Since 2018 LINBIT offers persistent block storage for Kubernetes.[34] LINBIT announced the general availability of LINBIT SDS, which offers container-native persistent block storage for stateful applications and support for the MariaDB database.

LINBIT SDS is based on LINSTOR as a volume and configuration-management system and DRBD as an in-kernel data replication software. In December 2018, it also started offering disaster recovery replication for critical data in a system or container crash.[35]

#### OpenSDS project

OpenSDS is a Linux foundation and an open-source community project addressing some SDS integration issues to increase the ratification and support of open-source standards.[36]

#### OpenShift

In 2019 LINBIT achieved a Red Hat Container certification for LINSTOR. Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux users can access the LINSTOR repositories through the Red Hat container catalog for Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise.[37]

#### OpenNebula

In 2018 LINBIT announced a reference architecture in collaboration with the cloud platform leader OpenNebula.[38] The architecture demonstrates that a container native SDS solution can be easily deployed while at the same time providing unprecedented speed and reliability.[39]

#### OpenStack

OpenStack Persistent Storage Support Includes LINSTOR, DRBD, and LINBIT Enterprise Support. Users of LINSTOR have the option to combine it with OpenStack for greater flexibility and power by allowing Linux to be their SDS platform of choice.[40]

#### Proxmox

Proxmox VE is an open-source server management platform for your enterprise virtualization. It tightly integrates KVM hypervisor and LXC, software-defined storage (LINSTOR), and networking functionality on a single platform. LINBIT SDS has a Perl plugin for Proxmox that, in combination with LINSTOR, allows to replicate VM disks on several Proxmox VE nodes. This allows to live-migrate active VMs within a few seconds and with no downtime without needing a central SAN, as the data is already replicated to multiple nodes.[41]

## Partnerships

### Trillio

In 2018 Trillio became a certified LINBIT partner by providing the application-level disaster recovery solution TrilioVault for Kubernetes.[42] This gives LINSTOR users the capacity to restore at any point in time fully, on-demand - entire Kubernetes applications, including all Kubernetes objects such as label, Helm chart, and Operator-based deployments.

### SUSE

LINBIT enhances SUSE's high availability solution built on open source software and runs on commodity hardware.[43] Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension guards against failures or disasters by providing policy-driven mechanisms for customer applications and data to continue operations in another geographically dispersed data center. In 2017 LINBIT and SUSE announced their offer for a 60-Day Free Trial for Proven Open Source Alternative to Expensive Legacy Solutions to Enable Long Distance Data Replication for Geo Clustering.

### Western Digital

Since 2020 Western Digital combines its OpenFlex platform LINBIT's LINSTOR software.[44] Western Digital's disaggregated SDS approach allows northbound connectors to workload orchestrators like Kubernetes and OpenStack software. Western Digital's OpenFlex platform provides the storage tools and resources for organizations taking a truly disaggregated approach to their software-defined storage (SDS) infrastructure. Combining this with LINBIT's LINSTOR software will enable northbound connectors to workload orchestrators like Kubernetes (K8s) and OpenStack® software. The recent addition of a southbound driver for Western Digital's Open Composable Application Programming Interface (API) bridges the gap between Kubernetes/OpenStack and managing volumes on the NVMe-oF™ capable storage hardware.

### IBM

In 2015 LINBIT and IBM declared the DRBD support for IBM power systems. DRBD, which allows network-based data-mirroring by commodity hardware, was also announced to support Linux on Power architectures.[45] In 2020 LINBIT became one of IBM Z ecosystem partners for their hybrid cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxOne.[46]

### Intel

Intel and LINBIT maintain a healthy relationship and have partnered on different occasions. In 2016 LINBIT conducted a performance test with Intel DC S 3700 Series 800GB SATA SSD drives. In 2020 Intel was a significant partner of LINBIT's IOPS world record, as the test cluster was provided through the Intel®️ Data Center Builders program.[47] In 2018 the CEO of LINBIT, Philip Reisner, was also invited to share his opinion about the New Approach to Data Center management in the Intel company Podcast. "Social hub."[48]

The words LINSTOR®, DRBD®, LINBIT®, and the logo LINSTOR®, DRBD®, and LINBIT® are trademarks or registered trademarks of LINBIT in Austria, the United States and other countries. Copyright © 2021 LINBIT All rights reserved.[49]

## References

1. ↑ "High Availability". https://www.linbit.com/high-availability/.
2. ↑ "Disaster Recovery". https://www.linbit.com/disaster-recovery/.
3. ↑ "Software Defined Storage". https://www.linbit.com/software-defined-storage/.
4. ↑ "SDS vor VMware environments". https://www.linbit.com/linbit-vsan-software-defined-storage-for-vmware​/.
5. ↑ "Custom Features & Integrations". https://www.linbit.com/custom-integration/.
6. ↑ "High Availability - LINBIT article". https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20121203005090/en/2796215/LINBIT-Launches-New-Version-High-Availability-Solution.
7. ↑ "linbit_usa_celebrates_10_years_of_operations_in_the_americas". https://www.prweb.com/releases/linbit_usa_celebrates_10_years_of_operations_in_the_americas/prweb15723035.htm.
8. ↑ "linus-torvalds-accepts-drbd-into-linux-kernel". https://www.linbit.com/linus-torvalds-accepts-drbd-into-linux-kernel/.
9. ↑ "www.kernel.org DRBD index listing". https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/drbd/index.html.
10. ↑ "linbit-celebrates-one-millionth-download-of-drbd". https://www.linbit.com/linbit-celebrates-one-millionth-download-of-drbd/.
11. ↑ "LINBIT breaks IOPS world record". https://containerjournal.com/news/news-releases/linbit-announces-14-8-million-iops-world-record-for-hyperconverged-storage/.
12. ↑ "linbit_announces_linbit_vsan". https://www.prweb.com/releases/linbit_announces_linbit_vsan_a_storage_platform_that_combines_both_flexibility_and_performance/prweb17281805.htm.
13. ↑ "linbit-partners-with-western-digital-to-support-storage-demands-of-ai-technologies". https://techeconomy.ng/2020/11/linbit-partners-with-western-digital-to-support-storage-demands-of-ai-technologies/.
14. ↑ "GigaOM radar for software-defined storage". https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/6470709/gigaom-radar-for-software-defined-storage.pdf.
15. ↑ "GigaOm Radar for Data Storage for Kubernetes". https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/6470709/gigaom-radar-for-data-storage-for-kubernetes.pdf.
16. ↑ "Red Hat Marketplace LINBIT listing". https://marketplace.redhat.com/en-us/products/linbit.
17. ↑ "DRBD page - github". https://github.com/LINBIT/drbd/.
18. ↑ "DRBD Merged into Mainline Kernel". https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/DRBD-Merged-into-Mainline-Kernel.
19. ↑ "LINSTOR page - github". https://github.com/LINBIT/linstor-server/.
20. ↑ "landscape.cncf.io cloud native-storage listing: linstor". https://landscape.cncf.io/card-mode?category=cloud-native-storage&grouping=category&selected=linstor.
21. ↑ "csync2 page - github". https://github.com/LINBIT/csync2.
22. ↑ "piraeus datastore page - github". https://github.com/piraeusdatastore/piraeus.
23. ↑ "linbit-piraeus-datastore-software-defined-storage-sds-kubernetes/". https://www.linbit.com/linbit-piraeus-datastore-software-defined-storage-sds-kubernetes/.
24. ↑ "Piraeus website". https://piraeus.io.
25. ↑ "Linux-foundation-membership listing". https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/press-release/soda-foundation-gains-new-investments-expands-charter-to-address-increasing-need-for-data-autonomy/.
26. ↑ "LINBIT CNCF membership listing". https://landscape.cncf.io/members?selected=linbit-member.
27. ↑ "CNCF surpasses 375 members". https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2019/03/12/cloud-native-computing-foundation-surpasses-375-members/.
28. ↑ "LINBIT CNCF presentations". https://community.cncf.io/search/linbit.
29. ↑ "drbd-linstor-vs-ceph". https://www.linbit.com/drbd-linstor-vs-ceph/.
30. ↑ "LINSTOR DRBD vs Ceph performance test press release". https://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/10/prweb13779916.htm.
31. ↑ "Github Linbit profile". https://github.com/LINBIT.
32. ↑ "LINBIT Slack Channel blog post". https://www.linbit.com/5-reasons-why-you-should-join-the-linbit-slack-channel/.
33. ↑ "LINSTOR Days event page". https://www.linbit.com/linstor-days-sds-virtual-event/.
34. ↑ "https://wwlinbit-announces-open-source-persistent-block-storage-for-kubernetes". https://www.linbit.com/linbit-announces-open-source-persistent-block-storage-for-kubernetes/.
35. ↑ "linbit_sds_adds_disaster_recovery_and_support_for_kubernetes". https://www.prweb.com/releases/linbit_sds_adds_disaster_recovery_and_support_for_kubernetes/prweb15962093.htm.
36. ↑ "linbit-joins-the-open-source-opensds-project". https://linuxfoundation.org/en/press-release/linbit-joins-the-open-source-opensds-project/.
37. ↑ "LINBIT repositories can be accessed through the Red Hat container catalog". https://rhc4tp-cms-prod-vpc-76857813.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/LINBIT Press Release.pdf.
38. ↑ "linbit-and-opennebula-launch-reference-architecture-for-container-native-software-defined-storage-sds". https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/linbit-and-opennebula-launch-reference-architecture-for-container-native-software-defined-storage-sds-300744366.html.
39. ↑ "linbit + opennebula solution page". https://www.linbit.com/opennebula/.
40. ↑ "Why use linstor-openstack". https://www.linbit.com/why-linstor-openstack-use/.
41. ↑ "Secure-storage-with-DRBD9-and-Proxmox". https://sudonull.com/post/13691-Secure-storage-with-DRBD9-and-Proxmox-Part-1-NFS.
42. ↑ "linbit-announces-partnership-with-trilio-for-cloud-backup-of-kubernetes-applications-and-related-storage-volumes". https://www.trilio.io/resources/linbit-announces-partnership-with-trilio-for-cloud-backup-of-kubernetes-applications-and-related-storage-volumes/.
43. ↑ "LINBIT SUSE partnership announcement". https://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/01/prweb13983451.htm.
44. ↑ "inbit-partners-with-western-digital-to-support-storage-demands-of-ai-technologies/". https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/11/03/linbit-kubernetes-western-digital-openflex/.
45. ↑ "linbit-announces-drbd-support-for-ibm-power-systems". https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/linbit-announces-drbd-support-for-ibm-power-systems/.
46. ↑ "IBM Z and LINBIT SDS ecosystem partnership announcement". https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/blogs/adam-jollans1/2020/12/01/innovating-ecosystem-red-hat-openshift-ibm-z-linux.
47. ↑ "intel-dc-3700-sata-ssd post". https://www.linbit.com/intel-dc-3700-sata-ssd/.
48. ↑ "linbit-and-intel-rsd-a-new-approach-to-data-center-management". https://builders.intel.com/datacenter/social-hub/podcast/linbit-and-intel-rsd-a-new-approach-to-data-center-management-intel-citc-episode-155.
49. ↑ "LINBIT website". https://www.linbit.com/.

## External links

* Official website

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