DRBD für Hewlett-Packard GmbH

Background
HP Germany is the German division of HP, the world's market-leader when it comes to manufacturing computers. HP offers its clients a widespread range of products including the planning and the installation of server systems.
HP feels home in the big data centers as well as in small and middle-sized businesses. The company, which was originally founded in a garage that later became the heart of the silicon valley, aims to provide solutions tailored exactly to the client's needs.

Business Case
High Availability is a must for every company these days, no matter how big it is. One of the most challenging aspects of HA setups is the redundancy of data. SAN storage devices are the conventional approach to this problem, however, they are expensive and can quickly blow the budget of SMBs. HP thus has decided to use DRBD®, the state-of-the-art solution for redundant data storage in Linux.

Solution
A DRBD drive can be used like any other storage device. With a file system on top of it, from an application's point of view, there is no difference between a “real” hard disk and a DRBD® device. DRBD® mirrors any data written to the disk in one node of the cluster over to the other node as well, effectively creating an exact copy of the whole set of data on another physical machine. In combination with the Pacemaker cluster manager, DRBD® makes your data available independently on two hosts, allowing for a quick fail-over in case one cluster node goes down. With DRBD®, user's have all the benefits of a SAN device without having to cope with the disadvantages.

Benefits
DRBD® has been going through active development for more than ten years. As of february 2010, Linus Torvalds made it an official part of the Linux kernel, knighting it and acknowledging the need for a professional data replication solution for Linux. Thanks to DRBD®, it is possible to have a highly available data storage without any additional costs compared to standard Linux system installations. Due to the fact that HP as a real “Global Player” entrusts its customers' data to DRBD®, there is no space left for putting the value of DRBD® into question.

Produits OSS utilisés:

DRBD