45Drives Partners with LINBIT

45Drives Ltd. announced a strategic partnership with LINBIT, creators of DRBD and Linstor.

This collaboration combines 45Drives’ open hardware and support model with LINBIT’s software-defined storage stack to deliver fully integrated, HA server solutions for today’s most demanding environments.

Together, the 2 companies are bringing highly available clustered storage into the hands of more businesses, institutions, and creators – without the traditional cost and complexity barriers that come with closed, proprietary systems.

“We believe enterprise storage should be open, understandable, and built for the long haul,” said Dr. Doug Milburn, president , 45Drives. “LINBIT has been advancing that same mission in the Linux software world for more than two decades. Their work on DRBD and LINSTOR has set the standard for open-source block-level replication and storage orchestration. We’re excited to bring their tech directly to our customers in an enterprise-ready form.”

Partnership Built on Shared Open Source Values
LINBIT, founded by Philipp Reisner – who originally started DRBD development in 1999 as his master’s thesis – has grown into 1 of trusted names in Linux-based storage. With offices in Vienna, Austria, and Portland, Oregon, the company supports global customers with 24x7x365 support and a 1-hour emergency SLA. LINBIT’s software is deployed by everyone from small businesses to global giants like Apple, IBM, and Amazon, and has been downloaded over 40 million times.

“We’re excited to collaborate with 45Drives because they bring our open storage tools to life in the real world,” said Philipp Reisner, CEO, LINBIT. “Their approach to hardware and customer support is a perfect match for the kind of robust, production-grade deployments our software was built for. Together, we’re reaching new users and helping organizations rethink what’s possible with open infrastructure.”

This partnership brings LINBIT’s cutting-edge technologies – particularly DRBD and LINSTOR – into 45Drives’ hardware and support ecosystem. DRBD enables real-time block-level replication between nodes, forming the backbone of high-availability clusters, while LINSTOR automates storage provisioning in clustered environments, supporting bare metal, VMs, and Kubernetes-native deployments.

For 45Drives customers, this means turnkey access to:

• HA, clustered storage architectures built on proven open-source tools
• Certified integration of LINBIT software with 45Drives hardware, backed by expert support
• Resilient data protection through synchronous replication and failover
• Scalable deployments across bare metal, virtualized, or containerized environments
• Freedom from vendor lock-in with complete transparency into every layer of the stack

Enabling Open Infrastructure at Scale
This partnership also aligns with 45Drives’ broader mission: to make open hardware, open software, and open thinking the foundation of modern enterprise IT. While the market has long been dominated by closed systems that prioritize margin over transparency, 45Drives and LINBIT offer a powerful alternative – giving customers complete control of their infrastructure, long-term cost predictability, and access to deep technical expertise without the runaround.