Drobo is like Wonka's Chocolate Factory for storage geeks

Data Robotics spent the last year transforming itself from a maker of expensive consumer storage devices to a player in the nascent small enterprise storage array market. That process took another step this week, as Data Robotics officially renamed itself Drobo. It is ironic that the company would shed a longer, corporate sounding name for the familiar consumer product designation, but there is no denying the power of the Drobo brand.

Drobo’s Transformation

Data Robotics was founded by storage industry pioneer Geoff Barrall, who wanted to transform the storage industry with flexibility and ease-of-use as central components. The Data Robotics team developed a simple four bay home storage device and gave it the name, Drobo. This was a basic and low performance device but found many takers in the prosumer market thanks to its innovative “BeyondRAID” technology.

BeyondRAID gave the little Drobo amazing powers: Thin provisioning meant that the device would flexibly accommodate nearly any combination of hard disk drives without requiring the user to delete and migrate data, and the unit could be expanded simply by swapping out smaller drives for larger ones. But the four slot unit was slow and expensive compared to feature packed but less friendly alternatives. By 2008, it seems that Data Robotics had expended all it could.

This changed in April of 2009 with the introduction of the eight bay DroboPro. Although still fairly limited, the DroboPro indicated that data robotics was serious about expanding into new markets, especially small business datacenters. The real innovation appeared later that year with the introduction of the high-performance Drobo S and iSCSI DroboElite, a sneak preview of which was a highlight of the Tech Field Day event I put together that November.

Big Changes

Unbeknownst to me, bigger things were afoot behind the scenes at Data Robotics in 2009. Entrepreneurial founder Barrall, whom I remain close to, was replaced as CEO less than a month later by storage industry veteran, Tom Buiocchi. The board decided to accelerate the development of business focused storage devices like the DroboElite, and development was underway on an entire new product line.

DroboFS, introduced in April at the second Tech Field Day event, brought an integrated file system interface to the same five-day form factor of the Drobo S. This was a much better solution than the existing DroboShare add-on device, though I was less enthusiastic about the prospect of running third-party software on the device.

Drobo continued moving in the direction of small business datacenters needs, and their introduction in early 2011 of a business focused line of storage devices came as no surprise to industry insiders. The new family of products, once again previewed at Tech Field Day, included eight bay and 12 bay devices with iSCSI or NAS capability, automated tiered storage, and VMware and Microsoft certification.

Although the B1200i, B800i, and B800fs still lack many of the enterprise features found in higher-end storage devices, they have proved themselves in the market. I have found these devices in many small business datacenters, all of whom praised them for their simplicity and flexibility.

Drobo. Just Drobo.

The Drobo marketing team hinted to me earlier this year that the Data Robotics name was on the way out. They felt that the positive connotations of “Drobo” outweighed its familiar association with consumer products, and I must agree. I know very few people, other than industry insiders, who ever even heard of the Data Robotics brand, yet many photographers, IT geeks, and consumer electronics enthusiasts have brought up Drobo in conversation.

Going with the Drobo name seems logical for the company, though they will have to overcome the stigma of starting out as a consumer electronics company. Small businesses seem to have no trouble at all having a Drobo in their data center, but what about larger organizations? Will an enterprise be willing to accept a Drobo branded product even for small office or remote office use? Or will they rejected out of hand, assuming it is the same old consumer electronics device they may have heard of?

I remain impressed by the Drobo technology, and the evolution of BeyondRAID is heading in the right direction. Drobo remains the only device that really nails thin provisioning on the storage array, and this gives it a real leg up when developing advanced features. Although Drobo storage devices are expensive, they are worth it if you value the kind of ease-of-use and flexibility they offer. I personally bought a four bay Drobo unit for my day-to-day storage needs, and am in the process of upgrading to a second-generation Drobo S. I look forward to seeing more progress from the company now known as Drobo in the days ahead.

Disclaimer: I was a Drobo buyer before I got anything from the company, but have developed close relationships since then. They have sponsored three of the Tech Field Day events I organize, have provided me and my friends with review units, and are always available to take my calls. That being said, Drobo did not encourage or sponsor this or any other article I have written about the company, and did not alert me to this name change announcement ahead of time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | The Transformation from Data Robotics to Drobo
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

As I wrote, this got longer and longer. So I’ve split it up into a series of posts:

• Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camcorder Review
• Azden SMX-10 Stereo Shotgun and Generic OLM-10 Lavalier Microphone Review
• Zoom H1 “Handy Recorder”: Hands-On Review
• Sony NEX-5 Camera Review

Recent Examples

Here are some example videos made with the equipment described above.

Symantec Donating to Teacher Exchange

A bit yellow (there’s no white balance on the Zi8) but this was a very dim and noisy location with a hastily-recruited camera-woman (thanks, Gina!). If I hadn’t had a good mic the recording would have been ruined by the environment, but everything worked out fine in the end.

Drobo S Unboxing

This was shot with the Zi8 on a tripod and the lav mic clipped to my shirt. It was a quiet environment, and the long lav wire allowed me to move around freely.

Introducing Ciphertex at Interop

Another show-floor video where I used the Zi8 and Azden mic handheld. It was a bright but very noisy location with a moving subject – a real challenge for a handheld mic!

Meeting Thomas Jones at EMC World

Another recruited cameraman for a hand-held shot with the Zi8 and Azden mic. Thomas asked about the mic, prompting me to write all of this!

Stephen’s Stance

Good equipment can make the difference between an amateurish embarrassment and professional production when it comes to video recording. The combination of the Zi8 and my pair of microphones collect good enough source material to keep me in the latter category. Combined with the capabilities of Apple’s iMovie software, I can produce respectable videos anywhere I happen to find myself.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | My “On the Road” Video Recording Kit
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The new Drobo FS brings native file sharing capability and a whole world of add-on "apps"

Data Robotics is back with yet another member in the rapidly-expanding Drobo family of “storage robots.” The newly-announced Drobo FS brings gigabit Ethernet, file-sharing protocols, and installable apps to the platform’s industry-leading flexibility and data protection. But Drobo FS is no slam dunk: It’s expensive, not found in (many) stores, and the value proposition can be difficult to comprehend. Will Drobo FS sink or swim?

Drobo FS: The File-Based Drobo

It used to be so easy: Drobo was a 4-drive SOHO storage device that protected your data, allowed easy and seamless drive swaps, and attached with a USB or FireWire cable. The lauded Drobo operational simplicity remains, but the newly-expanded Drobo family is starting to look awfully complex. Instead of a single product, Data Robotics now sells no fewer than five models of Drobo.

And baby makes five? The Drobo line runs from the old 4-drive direct-attach Drobo to the iSCSI SAN DroboElite and now includes the NAS DroboFS.

The original 4-drive direct-attach USB/FireWire Drobo was refreshed a few years ago. It remains the value leader, and I am totally committed to the gen-2 Drobo I purchased and rely on to protect my own data. Next up is the faster 5-drive eSATA/USB/FireWire Drobo S, upon which the Drobo FS was based. The Drobo family also includes two 8-drive iSCSI models: The single-computer DroboPro and full multi-server SAN capable DroboElite.

The new Drobo FS is an entirely different animal. Instead of presenting plain disk capacity (what we in the business call “block storage”), the FS acts like a file server. It “speaks” SMB/CIFS (the Windows protocol), AFP (the Apple Mac OS X protocol), and, through a free download, NFS (the UNIX protocol).

Plug the single gigabit Ethernet port of a Drobo FS into your home or office network and it will appear to be a Windows or Mac server with tons of available storage. This marks the first time a Drobo can be easily shared between many users: Although a front-end device like a PC or Mac (or the now-discontinued DroboShare) share the storage space from any Drobo over a network, it was a multi-step process that challenged some users. Of course, the DroboElite can share capacity using the iSCSI protocol, but that’s nowhere near as user-friendly as the Drobo FS NAS.

The Drobo FS shares much of its hardware with the impressive Drobo S, including its 5-drive chassis and dual-drive data protection. It also shares the high-performance CPU of the Drobo S, making the Drobo FS mighty fast for a small NAS. Although I have not benchmarked it myself, the company promises 40-50 MB/s read and 30-40 MB/s write performance, making it one of the fastest devices in this class. I’ll be eager to test those numbers out myself, since most of the competing devices have seriously disappointed me with their slow transfer speed.

The Drobo FS packs a single gigabit Ethernet port rather than the USB, FireWire, or eSATA found on other models

What’s missing from the Drobo FS is a USB, FireWire, or eSATA port. Like all Drobos but the DroboElite, the DroboFS is a single-purpose storage device. If you want to connect it to your PC, you have to use Ethernet and SMB, AFP, or NFS. This is not a limitation per se (competing devices, like the Iomega ix4 and Lacie Big5, are similarly limited to NAS-only), but may come as a surprise to the Drobo faithful. Note too that, unlike the DroboPro, DroboElite, and ix4, the Drobo FS is not VMware or Hyper-V certified, limiting its use as a virtualization lab target.

You might like reading some of the other pieces I’ve written about Drobo products.

The DroboApp Economy

Anyone who has unboxed a Drobo knows that the company has a serious crush on Apple. The single-purpose simplicity of the design similarly apes the boys from Cupertino. But the Drobo FS takes the fruit envy to a new level with DroboApps.

Like the iPad, the Drobo FS is a blank slate, waiting for you to customize and configure it as you like. At launch, Drobo FS can be upgraded to a media server for iTunes or UPnP/DLNA, a BitTorrent client, or a web server. All of these apps are free, and most are open source ports with varying degrees of stability. I long tried to use the Firefly media server on a similar NAS device, for example, but finally abandoned that buggy and limited software in favor of a real iTunes instance on my always-running iMac.

Most of these apps are inherited from the dead DroboShare, but new the revived platform is likely to spawn more interesting apps. Launching in May, Oxygen Cloud is particularly appealing. A “private cloud” service for the Drobo FS and public services including Amazon S3, Rackspace, Mozy, and Nirvainx, the Oxygen Cloud application allows clients to access files anywhere on many devices. Imagine sitting at Starbucks using your iPad to browse your home or office Drobo FS content! Oxygen Cloud also handles data replication and can even remotely wipe content from devices if needed.

Strangely, the Drobo FS lacks a web-based management interface. Instead, you must install the Drobo Dashboard application on a PC or Mac. And third-party apps each have their own management interface with little or no integration with the Drobo itself. This goes against my image of the Drobo, and I suggest that the company roll out a web-based plugin-friendly interface to integrate the user experience.

Should You Get A Drobo FS?

As a professional focused on data storage, my hearty endorsement goes to the Drobo platform. The BeyondRAID technology and solid engineering of these devices mitigate the serious risk of data loss posed by the unprotected “bare disk” storage devices that are so popular with computer users today.

I have had four hard disks crash in the last 12 months. Anyone less careful about backups than I would have lost data in three of those incidents, but the fourth deserves mention: I installed two brand new Samsung hard drives in my Drobo and started adding data. Within 48 hours, one of those drives had failed. I popped it out and returned it, inserting instead a Western Digital I found at Fry’s. When the replacement Samsung arrived, I popped that into the Drobo, too. Through it all, the Drobo protected my data and kept me up and running without a snag.

One nagging issue with the Drobo line is the price. List price for the Drobo FS with no disk drives installed is US$699 (that’s 469 quid or 519 of the fancy European ones). That’s a serious amount of money. The base Drobo is $300 cheaper, which is enough to buy a cheapie Windows or Linux box to use as a more full-featured NAS head. Shop around and you might be able to afford a used Mac Mini and a new Drobo for the same price as a Drobo FS!

Add in three 1.5 TB disks, and your Drobo FS investment is up to $1k. Is that too much to ask for peace of mind? Interestingly, the Drobo S lists for $100 more than the similar Drobo FS. Perhaps it’s time for Data Robotics to drop the price on that unit? Street prices for the Drobo S eliminate that $100 differential anyway.

The competing 4-drive 4 TB Iomega ix4-200d sells for about the same price as an empty Drobo FS. But the comparison reveals a fundamental difference between these products: The Iomega is only available with a full complement of drives and can not be upgraded. In contrast, the Drobo can be purchased empty, expanded on an as-needed basis, and easily upgraded in the future without data loss or even downtime. This is a huge difference, both in terms of initial cost and “live with it” longevity.

I decided that the Drobo was worth my own money. I bought an empty (heavily discounted) Drobo and two new (heavily discounted) hard disk drives for less than $500. Although I am happy with that choice, the Drobo S is simply too expensive for me to upgrade. I feel the same about the Drobo FS: My negative experience with many of the same open source apps used on the FS, combined with the high price tag, leave me happy with my current solution which combines a Drobo and an iMac.

One of the reasons I love the Drobo is the simple set-and-forget experience. Like the iPhone, the Drobo just works. But the Drobo FS suggests we should use third-party open-source apps, each with its own management interface and foibles. None of these will share files or serve media to Mac OS X and iTunes as well as OS X and iTunes itself, so why bother with the FS at all? Unless you want basic NAS connectivity or the coolness of Oxygen Cloud, I still recommend the original Drobo over any alternative, even the Drobo FS.

Disclaimer: Data Robotics is a paying sponsor of the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day, which I organize. I know many people at the company and was briefed ahead of this launch. Anyone reading this review will hopefully recognize that none of this influenced my opinion on this, or any, product.

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Review: Will Drobo FS Take The NAS Market By Storm?
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Western Digital is first to market with "Advanced Format" 4K-sector drives, but when will vendors support them?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new generation of hard disk drives that use 4K sectors rather than the historic 512 byte size. As I noted in that piece, although PC and Mac users with recent OS versions had nothing to fear from these, embedded devices like the TiVo and Drobo I use and love might not be compatible. I tried reaching out to these vendors, but only one has actually responded.

Drobo Compatibility Is Coming

You can discover all sorts of things in firmware release notes if you look hard enough. The latest firmware for the Data Robotics DroboElite and Drobo S (versions 1.0.1 and 2.0.1, respectively) now include 4K drive support. The former was released at the end of December, though I didn’t get around to blogging about it then. So users of the third-generation Drobo products are set as far as 4K “Advanced Format” drives go.

I sat down with Drobo’s new CEO, Tom Buiocchi, at the Business Development Event in Palo Alto today and asked about this issue. The company assures me that the still-current second-generation devices, the Drobo and Drobo Pro, will also get 4K disk drive support in their next firmware update. They recommend updating the firmware of any Drobo device before installing a 4K drive, since the drive will have to be reformatted and rebuilt otherwise. I appreciate their responsiveness.

Update: Drobo Pro (firmware 1.1.5) and the base Drobo (firmware 1.3.6) got 4k drive support in early February!

If Not Now, When?

Since these new drives remain scarce, I agree that this support alone is not cause for a firmware rev. But the fact that online retailers are shipping them with little notice or warning about incompatibility does raise flags. Here’s hoping everyone supports them before they become common!

I remain concerned that no other maker of embedded hard disk-based devices has responded. This is not a priority for those that don’t support end users swapping out hard disk drives, but there are many devices that remain questionable. I’d love to hear from Netgear, Iomega, Linksys, Synology and others regarding their level of support.

Update: Synology released updated firmware to support the Western Digital EARS 4K Advanced Format family of drives at the exact moment I posted this!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Drobo Adding 4K Drive Support – What About Everyone Else?
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Data Robotics is throwing a special Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Drobo Sale!

Regular readers of the Pack Rat blog know I love my Drobo. I’m not the only one – the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day delegates spilled a ton of virtual ink over the Drobo, and their Drobo videos are definitely worth watching! But the Drobo is a bit pricey, especially the newly-released Drobo S and Drobo Elite models. Happily, I offer a solution: Data Robotics was kind enough to arrange a special Tech Field Day Drobo sale, allowing each delegate who chooses to participate offer their own discount code!

The Discount – USA/Canada

The US and Canada stores currently have a sale running on all Drobo models and are also offering $30 and $60 rebates on the Drobo and DroboPro models. There’s no telling how long that will last.

The Tech Field Day codes offer the same discount on three of the four models, but yield an extra $100 off the Drobo Elite. The Tech Field Day codes are good at least through the end of 2009.

Note: Drobo informs me that the current $30 and $60 rebates can not be stacked with any of these discounts. You can always try submitting the form anyway, but you might get turned down.

The Discount – Europe

The European Drobo store has no current discounts, so the Tech Field Day codes are much more interesting!

Get Your Code!

Since each Tech Field Day delegate got his own code, it would be unfair to list just one here. Therefore, when a delegate decides to participate and posts his code, I will be adding a link here. You can pick your favorite and use that code at the US and Canada online Drobo Stores! If you would like to order from the European store, you need a special EU code.

• Bas Raayman: An early christmas present from Drobo
• Rich Brambley: Drobo Bo! Bo! Merry Christmas! Discount Code For VM /ETC readers
• Rick Vanover: Get Your Drobo On With These Discount Codes!
• Carlo Costanzo: Drobo iSCSI SAN Discount courtesy of Tech Field Day

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | The Great Tech Field Day Drobo Sale!
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Drobo CEO Geoff Barrall gives Gestalt IT Tech Field Day delegates a sneak peak at the new Drobo S and DroboElite

“Greetings to you,” said the invitation. “I shake you warmly by the hand!” So began the famous journey of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The same note might as well have been used when the delegates selected to attend Gestalt IT‘s Tech Field Day got to visit the Data Robotics chocolate factory. This littlest storage company has become the darling of techies, and they opened their doors to 15 lucky bloggers, giving a sneak peek at what everyone can see for themselves today, the Drobo S and DroboElite.

What’s the news? Data Robotics has doubled the size of their product line, adding two new Drobo storage devices alongside the existing Drobo (version 2) and DroboPro, which I’ve previously written about. There was much speculation about what Data Robotics would do next: Would they push the envelope with a big 20-drive unit or a tiny 2.5″ array?

Stephen Foskett unveils the DroboElite and Drobo S from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Instead, Data Robotics followed the lead of Willy Wonka’s great glass elevator, taking their existing small- and mid-sized Drobo and DroboPro in alternative directions:

• The Drobo S focuses on desktop performance, with an additional drive slot, eSATA, and faster internals
• The DroboElite is intended for small SANs and virtualization, with a (nearly) full iSCSI implementation

The existing second-generation Drobo and DroboPro continue, focusing on single-computer connectivity and ease of use.

Drobo S: High-Performance Desktop Storage

The "S" in Drobo S stands for "speed" with eSATA, an extra drive, and more-powerful internals

In photos, the new Drobo S looks a lot like the existing (and continuing) 4-drive Drobo unit. But it has a distinctly different look in person, with its curving metal bezel and taller stance. Indeed, the Drobo S looks almost un-Drobo-like: A little tougher and meaner than the cuddly rounded devices Data Robotics is known for.

Under the skin, however, the Drobo S is entirely new. Although Data Robotics isn’t giving specifics, they do claim at least a 50% bump in performance compared to the existing Drobo. I suspect that a new CPU and additional cache RAM is the source of this improvement. The extra drive slot is bound to help, too, since Drobo will stripe data across all available drives. As we all know, the first place storage companies look for performance is disk drive spindles!

That extra disk slot gives the Drobo S another important benefit: With dual parity operation, the Drobo S can protect against the simultaneous failure of two drives! Drobo added this capability to the 8-drive DroboPro earlier this year, but the 4-drive desktop unit still relies on single parity. Perhaps it lacks the CPU power required to support dual parity, or maybe it is artificially limited due to the fact that a 4-drive dual-parity Drobo would suffer a 50% capacity hit. Regardless, those wishing for enhanced data protection as well as improved performance can now step up to a Drobo S.

I am personally very pleased to see dual-drive redundancy come to a desktop Drobo. One of the things I love about my Drobo is the fact that my data is protected so well: If a disk drive fails (and they do fail often) I can slap in a new one and not lose anything. My one complaint is that there is no safe way to eject a drive from a Drobo: If you want to move from a 500 GB to a 1.5 TB drive, you just pop the drive out live and let Drobo handle the heavy lifting required to re-protect the data. Since this process leaves the drives working hard for hours, the risk of data loss increases to a level I find unacceptable. Dual-drive protection is an absolute requirement for irreplaceable data, and I am thankful that this is supported on the Drobo S, DroboPro, and DroboElite. I wish Data Robotics would implement a “data flush” feature on the Drobo, allowing me to tell the unit ahead of time to safely clear the content of a drive to be removed.

The Drobo S now included eSATA, but connectivity is still limited to a single computer

Although the desktop Drobo does not exactly push the performance limits of FireWire 800 (you would be lucky to get 50 MB/s throughput from a 4-drive Drobo), the Drobo S adds eSATA connectivity. I suspect that switching from USB or FireWire to eSATA will have little real-world performance impact, but it does open the intriguing possibility of an 8 TB TiVo! Mac users won’t notice this feature, however, since Uncle Steve refuses to equip Macs with eSATA ports.

It is important to reiterate that, although the Drobo S now features four data ports on the rear of the unit, only one port may be used at a time. Only the DroboElite (see below) is suitable for direct use by more than one computer. Capacity from the others can be shared as SMB, NFS, or AFP drives, but only if an appropriate intermediary (such as a DroboShare, Mac, or PC) is used. Let me be very clear here: You can choose either USB, FireWire, or (for the Drobo S) eSATA, but you cannot use all three at once. And that second FireWire port is only used to daisy-chain devices with which the Drobo can not and will not interact. Drobo is intended to be a simple direct-attached storage device, not an a networked storage server like the Iomega ix4.

Then there is pricing. The base Drobo price was reduced to US$399 earlier this year, and rebates and specials can drop that price much lower. I purchased my Drobo for just US$282, leveraging a discount, a rebate, and Bing Cashback. For all you get, Drobo is a killer value and I heartily recommend it to everyone with precious data to preserve. It’s also an investment, since Drobo remains the only storage device that can seamlessly add and upgrade the storage capacity on a drive-by-drive basis as needed.

The Drobo S starts at US$799, a price many may see as too high. Feature-wise, Drobo S is very similar to the base Drobo, with eSATA and dual-parity being the only main differentiators. But real-world use might justify this higher price: The added performance makes Drobo S a viable primary storage device for demanding applications like video editing, an activity that the base Drobo is not quite as capable at. I expect sales of the Drobo S to be somewhat slower than the base unit, but they will likely be strong in the “creative professional” market, where the added speed is a requirement. I also expect much whining and moaning over the price from the cheapskate fanboys in the audience!

In summary, the Drobo S is an excellent addition to the family, but not a slam dunk. Drobo S is a slantways upgrade, and I wonder if the additional performance and data protection will seem to be worth twice the price to prospective buyers. If anything, the Drobo S might promote sales of the cheaper base model Drobo!

DroboElite: A Real iSCSI SAN At Last!

DroboElite is a real iSCSI SAN at last

Drobos are like Apple Macs: As cool as they are, they never really seem all that business oriented. Simple, friendly, and functional are great attributes, but business use demands compatibility, flexibility, and support. DroboPro, with its rack-mount kit and iSCSI support, was definitely a gesture at the business world, but it was frustratingly limited to single-server duty.

All that changes today. DroboElite delivers nearly everything a small business could want from a computer closet storage device. It is a real honest-to-goodness iSCSI SAN array, supporting multiple servers and sporting dual gigabit Ethernet ports and dual-drive data protection. Data Robotics also claims VMware ESX certification, though the DroboElite does not yet appear on the VMware SAN support list.

So what separates the DroboElite from the similar-looking 8-drive DroboPro?

1. The DroboElite is the first Drobo to support multiple connected servers (via iSCSI)
2. One can now provision up to 255 Smart Volumes and these are protected with LUN masking
3. The DroboElite sports internal improvements to make it “at least 50% faster”
4. DroboElite gets an additional gigabit Ethernet port for iSCSI

Both the DroboPro and DroboElite share a similar 8-drive chassis and rack-mount kit, and both support dual-drive data protection. And of course, every Drobo sports Data Robotics’ unique BeyondRAID technology, allowing seamless live expansion and upgrades as well as thin provisioning.

All of these improvements make DroboElite the first Drobo to be truly business-ready. A single DroboElite can share storage volumes over gigabit Ethernet to one or a dozen servers. These can be PCs running Windows or Linux, Macs running OS X, or VMware ESX servers, each of which would enjoy the benefits of thin provisioned storage capacity. These volumes appear as large direct-attached hard disk drives using iSCSI initiator software available for all four operating systems, and the DroboElite will protect them to keep misbehaving servers from stomping on the storage of others.

Users of VMware ESX will especially enjoy the flexibility of thin provisioning and multiple iSCSI volumes. DroboElite supports both VMFS and RDM over iSCSI, both of which are supported by Drobo’s thin provisioning and un-provisioning. That last is key: All Drobo devices “spy” on supported partition schemes and filesystems, reclaiming space as files are deleted!

There are some limitations, however. Non-thin VMDK images “nested” in VMFS are not thin provisioned by Drobo either: It sees the entire allocated size as being used. Although the additional gigabit Ethernet port is a welcome addition, it does not support HA (active/passive or active/active) configuration. Finally, the DroboElite (like nearly all other low-end iSCSI arrays) does not yet support SCSI3 persistent reservation so it is not suitable for Windows clustering.

Most smaller businesses fall well within these limits, however. Unlike the DroboPro, which is really only suitable for single-computer use, the DroboElite promises to be everything most small and even medium-sized businesses need in a storage system: Inexpensive, reliable, flexible, simple to install and manage, and performant enough for operational use. The DroboElite joins the Drobo on my short list of recommended products: Every home and business user should have flexible and reliable data storage, and the Drobo and DroboElite fit the bill perfectly.

Up and Out!

So did Drobo blow the roof off of the storage market? Not really. Like Willy Wonka or the House of Jobs, Drobo can be hard to comprehend for outsiders. Drobo storage systems are more expensive than seemingly-similar devices from other vendors and lack many of the features listed on their boxes. And this new product rollout does not stray far from that formula. Indeed, many will likely find it difficult to differentiate the four-Drobo product lineup.

But believers in simplicity (oh heck, let’s just call them “Mac users”) will love what Data Robotics is doing. Compulsively-complete feature lists terrify them as much on a storage system as on a Microsoft package, and are just about as useful. Rather than doing everything, Drobo focuses on doing what’s needed simply, cleanly, and unobtrusively. It’s ironic that some of the most elegantly-designed hardware I own (the Mac Mini and Drobo) simply disappear on my desk. But they do their work and let me do mine. What else could I want?

To those in the know, Data Robotics is becoming as much an admired company as Apple, and for similar reasons. This explains the “golden ticket” atmosphere of the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day, as well as resulting videos like this one, from Rod Haywood. Sounds like success to me!

Drobo configuration by a 12 year old from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Drobo Goes Sideways and Slantways With the Drobo S and Drobo Elite
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.