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.

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.

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.

Iomega's StorCenter Pro ix4-100 is VMware certified, hot swappable, and not bad to look at!

As I expected, EMC’s Iomega subsidiary today rolled out the StorCenter Pro ix4-100 a big brother to the popular but plain StorCenter ix2 NAS device. This new model add hot-swappable drives (there are four now), RAID-5, and a longer warranty to make it suitable for small office use. It uses a blacked-out version of the chassis from the non-LifeLine StorCenter Pro 150d.

Like the ix2, the Pro ix4 is certified for VMware ESX using NFS. iSCSI is still absent, though EMC folks have talked about adding this in short order.

This is the third member of the LifeLine-powered NAS family from Iomega: The confusingly-named single-drive Home Media Network Hard Disk Drive, the dual-drive StorCenter ix2, and this four-drive StorCenter Pro ix4-100. The “-100″ nomenclature suggests that more 4-drive models might be on the way, perhaps a “-200″ model sharing its rackmount chassis with the existing non-LifeLine StorCenterPro 200rl.

With NetApp exiting the small-business market by ending their StoreVault line, who would have thought big old EMC would be the one to step up? At $799 or $1,299 for the 2 and 4 TB versions, the ix4 is about the same price as a Drobo, which is $749 or $999 plus $199 for the DroboShare NAS.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | EMC LifeLine Spreads To The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-100
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.

Data Robotics today introduced the second generation of what I think of as a personal storage array, but although the Drobo 2 offers great enhancements, making it a top choice for those needing massive and protected storage on a single computer, it’s still not what I’m looking for in a home storage device.

First, the good bits.  Drobo 2 adds FireWire 800 (and 400) for quicker storage access – the company claims it’s twice as fast, and I’d believe it.  They also beefed up the internal CPU and tightened the firmware to speed up USB transfer rates and added a larger, quieter fan to keep it quiet.  And the price remains the same at US$499.

There’s a lot to love here, just as with the first-generation device.  Drobo is a fully virtualized device with next-generation storage capabilities like thin provisioning, sub-disk RAID that can tolerate multiple drive failures (once the array has reconfigured after the first failure), and on-the-fly drive swapping and upgrades.  When attached to a PC or Mac, it appears as a single massive storage volume, and all of the technical bits just work in the background to keep your data protected.

I can’t imagine a better Time Machine backup device.  And now that FireWire 800 is available with its faster speeds, the Drobo makes a lot of sense as a budget array for video editing and other pro applications.

What’s not to love?  First, a Drobo still can’t be shared between computers without an add-on like the company’s aptly-named DroboShare NAS unit.  Although home users generally don’t need to partition their storage, pros might want to create separate volumes for Time Machine, Video, and Photos.  And many might want to share the device between multiple computers, perhaps using FireWire for their Mac and USB for a PC or DroboShare.  I suppose you could buy two, but $500 for a bare unit with no drives is a pretty penny!

But the device just can’t do this – if you want to share it, you have to dedicate it all to the DroboShare, which uses USB and presents SMB shares over gigabit Ethernet.  Actually, the DroboShare is an awfully nice NAS in its own right, supporting DLNA/UPnP for media streaming, and the company recently announced an SDK to allow additional applications to be added.

So all in all, Drobo 2 is a nice upgrade but not much of a revolution.  If you’re looking for massive, protected storage for a single computer at home, and have upwards of $700 to spend on it, you can’t make a better choice.  And FireWire makes it even more attractive to Mac users.  But I still wish Drobo could take all these Maxtor drives off my desk, offering speedy storage to both of my computers and my network devices.

PS: Data Robotics is currently offering the original Drobo at $349 to clear them out.  If you wanted one before, this price might get you off the couch!

[Engadget], [Blocks & Files]

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Drobo 2: Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree
This post was categorized as 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.