Case Study: Portland State University achieves highly available campus-wide CMS hosting with LINBIT DRBD

Portland State University - Customer Case Study

Portland State University, Oregon’s largest university with about 28,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff, needed a highly available way to host 150+ departmental websites on a single server for a new Drupal-based CMS. The university wanted a resilient setup that could survive hardware failure while remaining completely stand-alone, with no SAN connection to other systems. LINBIT’s DRBD technology was chosen to help meet those HA and storage requirements.

LINBIT implemented two DRBD-replicated devices for the Drupal multisite environment: one active/active volume using GFS for file storage and one active/standby MySQL setup managed by Heartbeat, with a load balancer distributing web traffic. The result was a scalable, redundant CMS platform that improved reliability and performance without relying on an expensive replicated SAN. Portland State University also noted that LINBIT’s DRBD solution is ready for future off-site replication with minimal additional effort.

Portland State University

Matt Whiteley

Sr. Systems Administrator