The interview
Q: What is your name?
I'm Philipp Reisner, CEO of Linbit, a company from Austria founded in 2001.
Q: What is your product?
Linbit is one of the leading companies in the field of Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD). This is a storage architecture that allows block devices to be replicated between different servers. Operating under Linux, our software-designed storage (SDS) has been promoting open source and Free Software for over twenty years now.
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? Is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
We cannot stress enough the importance of open source and avoiding vendor lock-in which is very prevelant on the market today. It is also one of the key arguments for clients choosing Linbit.
is a fast, high-performance solution that requires little hardware and RAM. Its open source base, developed from Linux tools such as Ubuntu and Red Hat, and its deployed virtualisation tools make it compatible with all software, as long as it has a Container Storage Interface (CSI), such as Kubernetes.
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
We have more than 3 million users worldwide and over 40 million downloads. Key clients using our solution are Amazon, Google, Apple, Nike, Siemens, Porsche, Oracle and IBM.
Linbit is very performance oriented, for example we hold the world record for Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) with 14.8 million, which is probably one reason, we also appeared as a possible solution for Amazon who is today using our database technology. We are also a market leader in High Availability and Disaster Recovery with our solution being used by the likes of Oracle, Apache, MySQL but also Western Digital, Intel, Kalray, SSD and Seagate who use our Hardware Abstraction Layer system.
Q: Can you give us an idea of sales/staff/clients/end users over the last 3 years?
We are a growing company and openend a second office in Oregon (USA) to meet the specific needs of our American customer base. Most of our 50 employees work in Europe or remotely from anywhere in the world.
Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?
IBM is one of our most representative customers with the integration of Linbit DRBD on IBM MQ Advance products for data and application integration and replication across multiple platforms simultaneously. By developing a specific implementation to meet IBM MQ's needs and avoid data divergence, we've met all expectations of the US heavyweight and count them as one of our key customers.