LINBIT, the High Availability Experts announce DRBD support for IBM POWER systems

BEAVERTON, Ore. & VIENNA - Nov. 12, 2015 - PRLog -- Today, at the IBM Linux on Power Anwendertag conference in Germany, LINBIT announced DRBD support for IBM Power systems. This comes just 1 week short of SC15 conference in Austin, TX- where LINBIT will also send representatives.

DRBD, developed and supported by LINBIT (http://www.linbit.com/), is integrated into the Linux kernel. It provides networked based data mirroring using commodity hardware; enabling High Availability functionality without the cost of expensive proprietary storage. Designed to eliminate data-loss and mitigate downtime during server failures, LINBIT’s DRBD has become the default data replication software for Linux High Availability clustering.

Historically, using LINBIT’s DRBD technology, organizations can replicate any Linux system built on standard X86 hardware. Today, LINBIT has announced DRBD support for Linux on Power architectures as well.

Linux on Power is now supported on Red Hat's RHEL 7.1 for Power8 processors and SUSE SLES 12 for Power8 processors. (ppc64le). LINBIT has announced that in addition to DRBD and Pacemaker support for High Availability purposes, DRBD Proxy is also supported for long-distance disaster recovery purposes.

“This development is the latest in a series of architectural changes allowing DRBD to be used in dynamic architectures,” stated Philipp Reisner, CTO of LINBIT. “First DRBD was used only on X86 machines in pairs of servers, then we extended replication over WAN environments using DRBD Proxy. Now, we have support for multiple Linux architectures and can replicate data in pools of storage with minimal overhead, making DRBD the best choice for resilient storage for high IO workloads in Cloud and virtualization environments.”

LINBIT business partner HighVail exclaimed, “As a strategic business partner of IBM, HighVail is focused on Open Source projects including running Linux on IBM Power Systems (LoP). We are very excited about the announcement from LINBIT providing support for DRBD on Power architectures.” Krys Armatys, CTO of HighVail went on to state, “We feel the growing adoption in the market for running Linux workloads on Power will provide customers with even greater flexibility and choice, ensuring continual operation of their business and mission-critical workloads. This coupled with the announcement of DRBDManage and DRBD’s integration with OpenStack’s Cinder module will even further accelerate standardization and use of these technologies in the enterprise.”

In terms of Linux workloads, IBM's Power (and OpenPower machines for HPC workloads) may overrun the dominant Intel Xeon based machines. After the decline of AMD it is important to see Power/OpenPower serving as opponent of Intel Xeon. LINBIT is excited to be an early developer for the platform, in order to bring their - open source - Enterprise Availability software to the IBM Power market.

Please direct inquiries to:
Greg Eckert
503-573-1262
sales_us@linbit.com