I’m speaking at Percona Live, LinuxCon Europe, and linux.conf.au. And I just co-founded a new company.

I have a few busy weeks behind me, and even busier weeks ahead. If you’ve been wondering why recently I haven’t been updating this space too frequently, here’s why:

Yours truly and fellow ex-Linbiters Martin Loschwitz and Andreas Kurz have recently founded hastexo, an independent professional services organization focused on open-source high availability and disaster recovery. We are already offering both on-site and …

At LINBIT, we are always eager to extend our partnerships and cooperations with technical consultants, service professionals, and sysadmins. So if you work for a company that might be interested in becoming a LINBIT partner and deliver first-class high availability services in Linux and open source to customers, we are always interested in hearing from you.

At this time in particular, we are looking for partners in the Australia/South Pacific region, so if you work for an outfit that might be a good partnership fit, please drop us a line. I am in Brisbane in January for …

Novell has announced Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux Enterprise. LINBIT is a key contributor to this release, delivering DRBD and a number or cluster resource agents as part of Novell’s SLE High Availability Extension add-on.

This puts Novell firmly ahead of competitor Red Hat in terms of currently released and supported HA clustering solutions.  In case you haven’t noticed, Red Hat is also being questioned by customers for not shipping DRBD at this time, …

So it seems Red Hat is a bit surprised (I’m not) by the number of subscribers on the “DRBD in RHEL 6, please” bug tripling in a couple of days. I guess they are also getting a few more tweets than usual about this.

But please, Red Hat’s EMEA Chief Supreme Open Source Evangelist saying “DRBD is limited with regard to integration with [Red Hat] Cluster”? Give me a break. I wrote the Red Hat Cluster Suite integration for DRBD. Lon Hohberger merged it almost a year ago. …

If you’re on software with a support contract, you should get support, right?

If the software you have support on has a documented feature that’s not working as documented, then you would expect to get a fix, a workaround, or even perhaps an explanation to the effect that you misunderstood the documentation in the first place, and the feature in fact does something else. Correct?

And if the feature in question is a customization facility, then you wouldn’t expect support on the customization itself, but you would expect the customization interface to work as documented, right?

So in summary, if you ran into an issue with a customization interface not working as the documentation says, you’d expect support to fix the interface, suggest a workaround, or provide additional documentation?

Well, I would.

SugarCRM appears to see things …

DRBD has entered a new phase. After being developed out of tree for 9 years, and after an extended review and streamlining phase since March, Phil submitted DRBD to be merged into 2.6.32 release of the Linux mainline kernel. The submission was accepted by block layer maintainer Jens Axboe, who merged DRBD in September, then deferred to the 2.6.33 merge window, and this morning Linus …

For those of you interested in high availability for databases, this week brought a whole flurry of DRBD related posts in the MySQL blogosphere.

To kick off the week, and perhaps surprisingly for some, Peter Zaitsev blogs about the superiority of DRBD over SAN based high availability for MySQL. The Percona folks seem to like our recently introduced support for Dolphin Express replication.

Then, Charlie Schluting kicks off a series of articles …

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 …

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, …

We have released a major makeover for our corporate website, www.linbit.com.

The new site contains a wealth of information for our customers and partners and comes with a spiffy all-new design. It’s worth a look — check it out!