LINSTOR grows beyond DRBD

For quite some time, LINSTOR® has been able to use NVMe-oF storage targets via the Swordfish API. This was expressed in LINSTOR as a resource definition that contains a single resource with one backing disk (that is the NVMe-oF target) and one diskless resource (that is the NVMe-oF initiator).

Layers in the storage stack

In the last few months the team has been busy making LINSTOR more generic, adding support for resource templates. A resource template describes a storage stack in terms of layers for specific resources/volumes. Here are some examples of such storage stacks:

    • DRBD® on top of logic volumes (LVM)
    • DRBD on top of zVols (ZFS)
    • Swordfish initiator & target on top of logic volumes (LVM)
    • DRBD on top of LUKS on top of logic volumes (LVM)
  • LVM only

The team came up with an elegant approach that introduces these additional resource templates in ways that allow existing LINSTOR configurations to keep their semantics as the default resource templates.

With this decoupling, we no longer need to have DRBD installed on LINSTOR clusters that do not require the replication functions of DRBD.

What does that mean for DRBD?

The interests of LINBIT’s® customers vary widely. Some want to use LINSTOR without DRBD – which is now supported. A very prominent example of this is Intel, who uses LINSTOR in its Rack Scale Design effort to connect storage nodes and compute nodes with NVMe-oF. In this example, the storage is disaggregated from the other nodes.

Other customers see converged architectures as a better fit. For converged scenarios, DRBD has many advantages over a pure data access protocol such as NVMe-oF. LINSTOR is built from the ground up to manage DRBD, therefore, the need for DRBD support will remain.

Linux-native NVMe-oF and NVMe/TCP

SNIA’s Swordfish has clear benefits with creating a standard for managing storage targets such as allowing optimized storage target implementations, as well as a hardware-accelerated data-path, non-Linux control path.

Due to the fact that Swordfish is an extension of Redfish, which needs to be implemented in the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), we have decided to extend LINSTOR’s driver set to configure NVMe-oF target and initiator software. We do this by utilizing existing tools found within the Linux operating system, eliminating the need for a Swordfish software stack.

Summary

LINSTOR now supports configurations without DRBD. It is now a unified storage orchestrator for replicated and non-replicated storage.

Philipp Reisner

Philipp Reisner

Philipp Reisner is founder and CEO of LINBIT in Vienna/Austria. His professional career has been dominated by developing DRBD, a storage replication for Linux. Today he leads a company of about 30 employees with locations in Vienna, Austria and Portland, Oregon.

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LINBIT is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. From time to time, we would like to contact you about our products and services, as well as other content that may be of interest to you. If you consent to us contacting you for this purpose, please tick above to say how you would like us to contact you.

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