Unnoticed by many, DRBD ports have been spreading for some time on non-Linux platforms. AVS for (Open-)Solaris has been around for a while, and HAST for FreeBSD joined the club last autumn.
And now, Windows. We have received a generous grant (from a source not wishing to have their identity disclosed in public) to fund a port to the Windows Server platform. Development work on this port has commenced back in mid-January.
It’s pretty exciting technology. Rather than tying in with the standard Windows block layer infrastructure, DRBD-W (that’s just a working title, we’ll eventually come up with a spiffier marketing name) is at the core of a brand new storage architecture. Termed Hyper-S, said architecture is actually a highly scalable, extremely light weight, distributed storage infrastructure for Windows based enterprise clouds.
Thus, the Windows DRBD port will not act as a typical installable Windows disk device driver (the “Press F6″ type), but as a special storage service installable on Hyper-V Server, made available to guest machines via a high-throughput, extremely low-latency paravirt I/O interface.
This, all in all, will completely free Windows administrators of any per-machine high availability worries: deploy a guest OS inside the Hyper-V/Hyper-S environment, point, click, go. Storage replication, high availability, cross-site geographical redundancy — all covered one level below.
Expect a webcast on this later this month.
An update to this post is here.