Florian’s blog

Today is an exciting day for us. We have announced that with the upcoming DRBD 8.3 release (currently scheduled for the end of this year), all those features that are currently commercially licensed in our DRBD+ add on will be merged into the GPL DRBD main source tree. That means that stacked device support, huge device support (larger than 4TB per device), and checksum-based resync are all coming to DRBD.

Is this something that we haven’t done before? No it’s not. We have, in the past, repeatedly merged DRBD+ features into DRBD. We have not, however, done so previously on this scale. That is new.

How will this affect our customers and users?

• First of all, if there ever was any relevant functionality gap between proprietary storage replication solutions and DRBD (there wasn’t — we had DRBD+ for that), not even a trace of any such gap will soon be left in DRBD as a fully open source, GPL-licensed solution.
• Secondly, for those would-be customers that previously had to back away from DRBD+ because it was not open source, and instead had to rely on open source drivers for proprietary hardware, that concern is now gone.
• And thirdly, it makes for much easier integration of DRBD into certified, fully open source high availability source software stacks, even for huge storage sizes. Whether that stack is maintained exclusively by us, by a partner, or by both jointly.

Has this been an easy decision? No, it took some contemplation. But we’re absolutely confident that it’s the right step in the right direction. So do watch our DRBD community web site for announcements regarding the 8.3 pre-release cycle and release.