Re: Support for DRDB

On 16/01/15 01:50 PM, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> On 01/16/2015 11:19 AM, Digimer wrote:
>
>> When RHEL 6 was released, Red Hat wanted to reduce their support
>> overhead a lot. So many things that used to be supported were dropped.
>> DRBD, unlike most other dropped programs, is still supported, just not
>> by RH directly. They worked out an agreement with LINBIT to allow
>> officially supported RHEL systems to be fully supported when they ran
>> DRBD.
>
> Ah, OK. We moved from RHEL to Centos a few years back so I'm not quite
> up to date on official RedHat's offerings anymore. I do know they bought
> ceph recently and now have their own shiny! cloudy! replicated iscsi
> block device, so ...

Two comments;

1. CentOS replicates RHEL, "warts and all". RHEL doesn't ship the DRBD 
RPMs anymore (that comes from the support via LINBIT), so thus, the RPMs 
aren't in CentOS, either.

2. DRBD is an HA technology, ceph/gluster are cloud technologies. Of 
course there is overlap (specially when someone tries to hammer 
solutions into place), but there really serve different use-cases. DRBD 
excels (and I would argue is untouched) in it's ability to replicate 
storage across two nodes, perfect for 90% of HA clusters. On the other 
hand, from what I've gathered, ceph/gluster shine brightest when they're 
on top of many nodes. Their goal is, first, scalability and resource 
utilization. DRBD's is, first, data protection.

So I don't think (but I don't know) that Red Hat's decision was based on 
an "we have our own shiny!) argument. I think that it was a case of 
looking at the back-porting effort of supporting DRBD on the 2.6.32 
kernel (drbd didn't go mainline until .33), looked at the potential 
revenue vs cost, came up with a viable alternative for customers who 
needed it and settled on that.

Again, my understanding only, I could be wrong.

-- 
Digimer
Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.ca/w/
What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a person without 
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