DRBD is accepted into the Linux kernel

HIGH AVAILABILITY Linux clusters will soon have the option of using the Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) filesystem software.

DRBD uses block devices as building blocks to form high availability clusters. It mirrors a whole block device via an assigned network. In case of a system failure, DRBD preserves distributed data in high availability clusters and provides incremental resynchronisation.

All jolly useful but it has taken more than a decade to get DRBD ready. Now it can see wide scale adoption as an add-on to the Linux kernel.

Florian Haas from Linbit, which has been developing DRBD, said that Linus Torvalds, accepted the source into the Linux kernel tree, which sometime next month should become the 2.6.33 release.

Reisner originally published the Distributed Replicated Block Device as part of his Master's thesis at the Vienna University of Technology ten years ago. Originally intended as a means of storing email messages in a redundant fashion, Reisner worked out that it had a greater potential.

In November 2001, he co-founded LINBIT, a Vienna, Austria based enterprise focused on advancing the development of DRBD and Linux high availability.

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

Despite the length of time taken Phil Reisner is happy with Torvalds decision to integrate DRBD into Linux. He said that it was a token of trust in DRBD and a terrific acknowledgment of the outfit's work.

Becoming part of Linux means that DRBD will be available to a wider audience of users enabling them to replicate data with more efficiency and control than ever before. µ