example), any application requiring direct access to a block device. DRBD-based clusters are often employed for adding synchronous replication and high availability to file servers, relational databases (such as MySQL), and many other workloads. Inclusion in Linux kernel DRBD's authors originally submitted the software to the Linux kernel community in July 2007, for possible inclusion in the canonical kernel.org version of the Linux kernel. After a lengthy review and several discussions, Linus Torvalds agreed to have DRBD as part of the official Linux kernel. DRBD was merged on 8 December 2009 during the "merge window" for Linux kernel version 2.6.33. See also Highly Available Storage High-availability cluster Disk mirroring References External links LINBIT High-Availability Linux project web site Storage software Virtualization software for Linux