Florian’s blog

Today we announced (German press release, English press release) a partner deal with Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, makers of the Dolphin Express highspeed interconnect technology. Like DRBD, Dolphin Express and Dolphin SuperSockets are well established within the MySQL customer base — the latter as a low-latency interconnect for MySQL Cluster. As part of the deal, DRBD will soon be available in a version supporting SuperSockets — which means you’ll be able to use Dolphin Express cards as a drop-in replacement for the Gigabit Ethernet cards you now typically run DRBD replication over. And you’ll be able to use Dolphin Express for MySQL High Availability in applications where MySQL Cluster is not the ideal choice, too.

This is really exciting stuff as it opens DRBD to a whole new class of database applications, namely those where low latency is critical. This used to be a common concern for some users. Especially with battery-backed write cache being ubiquitous these days, the fact that Gigabit Ethernet is actually quite high in latency caused surprises to some.

But do we stop at MySQL? Absolutely not. This is also a great addition to highly available PostgreSQL and Oracle databases. Do we stop at databases? Even less so. DRBD for Dolphin Express is a great low-latency, high-throughput replication solution for any highly available application. Think virtualization or petabyte file storage, for example.

We’re extremely happy to have Dolphin among our growing list of technology partners, and greatly enjoy working with them. Thanks guys for the work so far, and let’s continue full steam ahead!