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.

Data Robotics is back with the DroboPro FS 8-drive NAS for small business

Data Robotics today launched their sixth product, the business-oriented DroboPro FS file server. Combining the 8-drive chassis from the direct-attached DroboPro with the Linux-based file server engine fro the Drobo FS, the DroboPro FS (or “Pro FS” for short) gives small businesses and remote offices a simple networked location for their shared files. Although it is a bit more expensive than some of the competition, the Pro FS promises to be as easy to set up, use, and grow as previous devices from Data Robotics.

The Drobo I Know

The Drobo line of storage devices from Data Robotics is well-known to readers of my blog. I selected the second-generation Drobo (a 4-drive USB- or FireWire-attached device) as my own home storage solution, and have been very satisfied with it. I continue to recommend the Drobo for its simplicity, reliability, and ease of use. It was simple to set up and has grown with my storage requirements.

One of the coolest features of the entire Drobo line is the “bring your own drive” ethos: It appears as a single large drive (8 TB in my case) and drives can be added and swapped as needed without data loss, migration, or downtime. My own Drobo has grown from two to three to four drives without a hiccup, and has kept my data secure through two hard disk drive failures. I certainly would have lost some of my data by now if I hadn’t invested a few hundred dollars in a Drobo.

The New Drobo Family

No one was surprised when Data Robotics introduced an 8-drive model, the DroboPro, alongside the 4-drive desktop unit they became famous for. But their use of iSCSI was forward-thinking. Although it is only usable by a single connected computer, iSCSI gives the DroboPro more flexibility for rack- or even data-center placement as well as greater performance than the old USB or FireWire ports.

Data Robotics really enhanced their product line in late 2009 with the introduction of two more-capable models, the DroboElite and Drobo S. The Drobo S added a fifth drive slot, dual-drive reliability, and two to three times the performance of the old Drobo when connected with eSATA. I’m seriously considering an upgrade! The DroboElite took the Pro upscale with a second gigabit Ethernet port and multi-server iSCSI support. In fact, the Elite is certified VMware Ready for small-scale datacenter use!

The release earlier this year of the Drobo FS answered pundits (including me) who kept asking for NAS file server capability beyond the underwhelming DroboShare device. Boasting built-in support for Windows (SMB) and Apple (AFP) networks, the Drobo FS shares the 5-drive form factor of the Drobo S, making it a reasonable choice for small offices and home networks. It must have been a hit, too, since the Drobo FS has been in short supply, frequently backordered throughout 2010.

Drobo FS + DroboPro = DroboPro FS!

The DroboPro FS joins the Drobo FS in Data Robotics' NAS lineup

It wasn’t rocket science for Data Robotics to mix together the DroboPro’s 8-drive form factor with the Drobo FS’ NAS software, and that’s just what they did to produce the DroboPro FS. It brings a bit more computing horsepower to handle filesystem and network protocol access along with a second gigabit Ethernet port for reliability, but the Pro FS sticks to the “keep it simple” ethos.

Simplicity is the heart of the Drobo message. Although built on open-source software (Linux, Samba, and Netatalk), the DroboPro FS software is simple to configure, just like the rest of the product line. This contrasts with the “mess-of-menus” interface used to administer so many competing products! While these other devices try to speak more languages than the United Nations, Data Robotics keeps it simple with SMB and AFP.

The DroboPro FS retains all of the core Drobo features: Dual-drive reliability is an option I recommend for any device using more than four drives. The company’s BeyondRAID software allows drives to be added and swapped with no data migration time, and also lets the Pro FS use whatever make, model, or size of SATA drive is available when you need it. Under the hood, the Drobo software optimizes the layout and checks the consistency of data without operator intervention. In short, like all Drobos, the Pro FS just works.

DroboSync: Synchronize DroboPro FS Units

A major new feature in the DroboPro FS product is DroboSync, software which will synchronize all content on one DroboPro FS to a second Pro FS over LAN or WAN. Similar capability has been available using the rsync DroboApp for quite some time, but Data Robotics promises that DroboSync will be integrated, supported, and simple enough to become a core feature. This is a great addition, and worth a place on the defiantly-short list of DroboPro FS features.

Dubious About DroboApps

The Drobo FS and DroboPro FS, being Linux-based, can run other workloads than the SMB and AFP servers bundled from the factory. The DroboApps page at Drobo.com includes 11 others, from NFS to Apache, rsync to Perl. And the FS models can run other packages developed and supported entirely unofficially.

Although I remain positively enthusiastic about the Drobo products, and recommend them for small offices and professional users, I am less excited about these apps. Even those “blessed” by Data Robotics lack the level of simplicity and reliability implied by the Drobo name. Trying them out brought back nightmares from my old Linksys NSLU2 NAS, and creating a stable environment would probably require the same level of hacking and time.

In the past year, Apple has broken two of the open source packages that run on the Drobo FS, and the result is illuminating. Apple’s changes to Snow Leopard caused issues when using the Drobo FS as a Time Machine target. Since the AFP protocol is a core part of the Drobo FS, the company actively investigated the issue and worked to develop a fix to the underlying open source Netatalk package. Contrast this with the Firefly iTunes server offered in the DroboApps store. When iTunes 10 broke Firefly, it also stopped supporting the Drobo FS. Although Data Robotics is reportedly looking into the matter (login required), a fix has not yet been posted.

Since only the core AFP and SMB functionality is really supported by Data Robotics, it begs the question of the suitability of the other DroboApps packages. Indeed, I would have a hard time recommending reliance on any of these packages for production use. And I suggest that Data Robotics should reconsider whether to officially offer DroboApps at all! They should leave the option for individuals to run these apps on their own, but I do not feel they are of a high enough standard to get a “DroboName” and be listed as product features.

Stephen’s Stance

DroboPro FS is a solid addition to the Drobo family, and ought to be on the short list of any small business looking for an integrated NAS solution. The ease of use and simple livability inherent in the Drobo line remains a strong differentiator from the competition. I would like to see NFS promoted to a core DroboPro FS feature, however.

At just under US$2,000 for an empty chassis, the Pro FS is not cheap. Like all of Data Robotics’ products, stepping up to this premium product requires opening up the wallet. Although the Drobo ownership experience is a happy one, it must be difficult for many to justify this premium pricing relative to competing products from Iomega, Thecus, Synology, and others.

A look at the product matrix begs another question: Where will Data Robotics go from here? I imagine a higher-end 8-drive DroboElite FS might be in the works, but I would much rather see a 12-drive rackmount Drobo for larger businesses. Add in some serious CPU power (and maybe some flash cache) and we could have a real challenger in the “M” segment of the SMB market!

Disclosure: Data Robotics sponsored two Tech Field Day events which I organize for Gestalt IT. Their financial support went to that event, and I purchased my Drobo at retail with my own money. I write about them because I am impressed by their products, not because of any business relationship.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Review: DroboPro FS is Data Robotics SMB NAS
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.

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.

Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company’s products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the iSCSI StorCenter Pro ix4-200r. As of now, EMC’s SOHO storage subsidiary is a serious challenger in the small business and entry-level VMware ESX storage market.

It might look like the existing NAS 200rL, but the ix4-200r sports upgraded hardware and a new rev of EMC’s LifeLine storage software. This unit packs a serious punch, boasting full iSCSI target support for servers running Windows or Linux (or anything else with an iSCSI initiator) in addition to NFS, SMB, media streaming, print services, and just about every other protocol.

Although both Iomega and VMware are under the EMC corporate umbrella, it was a surprise to find that the ix4-200r is certified compatible with ESX using both iSCSI and NFS right out of the gate. This is the only inexpensive storage system to wear a VMware badge, and this alone will likely make it a fixture in small offices and VMware labs. The desktop StorCenter ix4-100 and StorCenter ix2 are already widely used in these environments even without iSCSI, after all. The ix4-200r provides a complete SAN-in-a-box, supporting multiple NAS and iSCSI shares with dynamic allocation of the internal RAID-5 protected storage.

Although aimed at the office, the ix4-200r retains the vast set of LifeLine capability we’ve seen in Iomega’s other offerings. This includes media streaming for UPnP (Twonky) and iTunes (Firefly), remote access, Active Directory support, and print services. The new unit even packs the more unusual Axis video surveillance capture capability. It sports two USB ports on the back and one on the front for expansion, data import, backup, or printers as well. Probably the best software feature is EMC’s Retrospect backup client, which was recently updated on the Mac platform.

The ix4-200r starts at just $1,799 (list) for 2 TB, and I expect resellers to dip well below that number. For comparison, Amazon currently sells the smaller non-iSCSI desktop 2 TB ix4-100 for $675 and the 1 TB ix2 for $268 and I’ve seen each for much less. I expect a street price of $1600 for the 2 TB rackmount unit – competing products from Buffalo and Netgear are priced and marked down similarly. The 4 TB model is priced $1,000 higher, perhaps unrealistically high given that the only difference is the use of 1 TB hard drive units instead of the 2 TB’s 500 GB drives. For comparison, Drobo just introduced their limited single-server 8-bay iSCSI DroboPro at $1,750 configured with four 500 GB drives. But none of these alternatives boast a spot on the ESX compatibility list, and I suspect this may be a deciding factor for many. Note that you can’t buy less than four hard drives in an ix4-200r, though the drives are easy to replace.

Iomega was kind enough to give me a preview of the ix4-200r at their offices, and I came away impressed by the new array and the company in general. They have a solid vision of the needs of the small office and are hard at work on products to meet them. Although the iSCSI support is not coming to the company’s other LifeLine-powered systems (the ix2, ix4-100, and Home Media) at this point, I would not be at all surprised to see it become a staple in future networked storage systems. A large gap remains below the EMC CLARiiON range, so I suspect that larger Iomega systems are on the way as well. As a potential buyer, I’d like to see Windows logo qualification, and Hyper-V support would be super as well. And as a Mac user, I’d love to see Time Machine support and for Iomega follow Drobo by offering a free iSCSI initiator – a guy can dream, right?

Updates and clarifications:

• Iomega has added the StorCenter Pro ix4-200r to their web site alongside the non-LifeLine StorCenterPro 200rL
• The ix4-200r will not be released until April 22, 2009
• The new rackmount ix4-200r is listed at $1799.99 for 2 TB and $2799.99 for 4 TB. I don’t expect to see either sell for less than a few hundred off those list prices
• The ix4-200r has been listed in the VMware ESX compatibility guide for a few days now for both iSCSI and NFS connectivity – I’m surprised no one noticed!
• Although it’s not mentioned in the press release, Iomega tells me that the StorCenter Pro ix4-200r does still support the BlueTooth file exchange found on its little brothers

More coverage:

• EMC’s StorageZilla posted his impressions as well: Iomega adds iSCSI, threatens war on us all
• Carlo Costanzo is excited to use this in VMware environments: EMC’s Low Cost SAN Starter for VMware (Iomega)
• Chris Mellor gives it a UK spin in The Register: Iomega opens sub-£2k box of storage tricks
• Duncan Epping is also excited about Home Lab Storage

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. | Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House
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.

DroboPro is here!

DroboPro is here, and it’s quite a compelling offering. It’s generating buzz (DroboPro was the number one trend on Twitter for a while on Tuesday) but is it deserving? In a word, yes. But I’m still not going to buy one!

The Drobo for Pros

Just as in Apple’s Mac and MacBook lineup, the “Pro” name denotes more of everything for the pro user or small business. The most obvious addition is four more drive slots, bringing maximum capacity up to eight 2 TB drives or a solid 16 TB of raw storage. Mix in data protection with Drobo’s unique BeyondRAID and subtract disk drive “liars inches”, and you’re left with 10.9 or 12.5 TB of usable capacity.

The difference in potential usable capacity is another Pro feature – optional protection from double drive failure. Nice! Users might be tempted to turn off this RAID-6-ish double parity protection in order to gain a little extra space, but I’d strongly suggest against that. With 8 drives spinning, the system is bound to eat a drive now and then, and good old Murphy’s Law (or the notorious bathtub curve of drive failures) is sure to spell doom for your data without extra protection. I suppose single-drive protection is acceptable for a 4-drive unit, but eight drives drives the risk of loss unacceptably high.

Around back is another major surprise: A gigabit Ethernet port. No, the Drobo Pro doesn’t incorporate the DroboShare’s NAS technology. Instead, the company added a simple and speedy iSCSI stack, bringing some serious performance potential to “the little drive array that could.” The company says that a gigabit iSCSI connection pushes nearly 80 MB/s, easily tripling the throughput of the system’s FireWire 800 or USB ports.

PC owners might be put off by the lack of an eSATA port, but they would be wise to use iSCSI instead. Warning: Watch out for the limited performance of low-end gigabit Ethernet switches! Just about any iSCSI initiator ought to be able to connect to the Drobo, and Windows users will happily use Microsoft’s solid and free software to connect. But iSCSI on the Mac is another matter, and Drobo dropped a bombshell here: They cooked up their own simple software iSCSI initiator for OS X and are offering it free to all! This is shout-out-loud news since functional OS X iSCSI software costs hundreds of dollars from other vendors and Apple’s built-in Leopard iSCSI support is AWOL even in the latest Snow Leopard builds.

On the software side, Drobo remains amazingly simple to configure. You won’t find even a dozen buttons in the management interface, and no tuning or configuration is required. The software continues Drobo’s tradition of presenting all attached storage as a 16 TB drive, regardless of how much is really installed. This means that capacity can grow and shrink as drives are hot-swapped in and out without the connected server even noticing. The Pro does add one new trick: You can tell it to present up to 16 of these fibbing drives to the attached server if you’d like to segment your data a bit. Pro owners can also disable drive spin-down for server use.

Drobo is positioning the Pro model as the perfect small business storage system, and I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it as bulletproof small-office storage. By far, DroboPro is the simplest storage device to manage, expand, maintain, and install. It’s cheap compared to other 8-drive RAID systems at $1200 empty and can grow to meet the needs of a dozen folks, or one especially productive one, with ease. Connect a Drobo Pro to your Mac Pro and you’ll grin like a little girl who just got her very own pony!

No Drobo For Me

Although I love DroboPro even more than Drobo classic, it’s not for me. DroboPro is exactly what the majority of folks need, but its intentional simplicity means that it wouldn’t work in my home office environment.

You see, Drobo can still only be connected to a single computer. Although the Pro unit sports a total of four ports on the back (two FireWire 800, one USB 2.0, and the gigabit Ethernet), users must pick one and ignore the rest. Even the iSCSI support is limited to serving up a single target. This is not a home SAN. It’s not even suitable as a Time Machine target for two Macs.

Yes, you can share the capacity of a Drobo with NFS, SMB, or AFP using a computer or DroboShare, but that’s not what techies like me want. We want to share its storage directly among a few computers, something the Drobo Pro teases with its iSCSI support but refuses to deliver. And don’t be fooled: The second FireWire port is for daisy-chaining other FireWire devices, not connecting multiple systems.

Do you want to support a mail server and a file server in your small office? Buy two Drobos or combine them into a single computer. But I’m not going to do this at home. Data Robotics also hasn’t yet logo-qualified the Drobo Pro for Windows but it worked fine in their demo. I’d love to see ESX and Hyper-V qualification, too!

Finally, note that not all of these features are trickling down to the 4-bay Drobo. It is obviously not iSCSI-capable, since it lacks both the gigabit Ethernet port and dual-core processing muscle of its big brother. Dual-drive data protection, drive spin-down disable, and multi-volume capability are missing as well, though I’d love to see the latter especially.

Despite these limitations, I would not hesitate to recommend Drobo and DroboPro as the best simple storage available.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Drobo For Pros But Not Me
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.