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.
Even though storage virtualization technologies have been on the market for 20 years or more, and numerous companies have tried to sell it as a product in its own right for at least half that long, many are still unsure of what to do with the technology. A great new piece by Dave Raffo, News Director at SearchStorage.com, discusses the wide variety of virtualization solutions and the real impact they can have.
Dave called me for this piece, and I was pleased with the question. Truth be told, there really are compelling benefits from virtualization, but most folks have been waiting for a real “must have” killer application for the technology. In order for this tech to make the impact it should, we in the industry have to change some of our thinking:
When I reviewed the Drobo SOHO disk array back in November, I noted that it had only to add a few features before I got really interested: NAS, EXT3, and eSATA. I also noted that only the first of these three would interest the majority of users. Well, apparently the company had the same idea, so today they introduced the DroboShare, a NAS gateway for one or two Drobo enclosures. It’s official - Drobo rocks! If you’re building a terabyte home, I suggest you run out and buy one!
What’s so great? Like most Apple products, it doesn’t do everything it could, but it does everything you need. It’s got gigabit Ethernet and (presumably) enough CPU power to use it, putting my NSLU2 (and Linksys’ embarrassing NAS200) to shame. It has two USB ports, supporting tons of storage from a pair of Drobos. It also natively supports all major PC filesystems (NTFS, FAT32, HFS+, and yes EXT3) so you don’t have to reformat to use it.
In fact, this last is a pretty interesting feature. You can just unplug your current Drobo from your PC or Mac and plug it into the DroboShare and all your data is preserved! Talk about easy migration! Not just that, but you can later unplug the Drobo again and plug it back into a PC or Mac if you need to! Very cool, and very much the kind of intuitive plug and play operation most end users will expect.
Interestingly, Drobo decided to introduce the DroboShare at Macworld instead of CES, where it would likely have been overlooked. Good move, I say! Now they just have to get these things into the brick-and-glass Apple Stores! Louis Gray and I were able to evangelize the Palo Alto Apple Store about the merits of Drobo in about five minutes - let’s hope the company can do the same!
Let’s hope Data Robotics repeats its $50 off promo from CES (”CES2008″ at drobostore.com) at Macworld! Or, better still, how about a DroboShare promo code, too! Maybe I’ll even buy one sometime…
There has been lots of talk about the Data Robotics (aka Drobo) SOHO “storage robot”
- whoever they have doing their marketing deserves a raise! When I first heard about it, I was pretty puzzled - Why care about yet another storage enclosure, especially an overly expensive one that doesn’t even have NAS features? On closer examination, I have become a believer in the potential of the device and the company. Drobo offers some key ingredients that promise future success to me: a clear focus on usability, novel thinking to solve a real-world problem, and that great marketing I mentioned earlier. Click through for the full story… Continue Reading »
After sticking staunchly to real CDs for home listening, I finally succumbed and expanded my terabyte house into the digital audio server domain. In the end, it was audiophile Mark Schlack from TechTarget who won me over - if digital audio is good enough for him, then it ought to be good enough for me!
Although both of my TiVos can browse and play mp3 files, they require the television to be on and a special server running on a PC (or so I thought, more on that later). It was critical that any digital music solution be directly browsable and searchable using a remote control, since the kids perk up whenever they hear the big tube on our Sony TV burp to life.
Although there are a good many home music players available, two immediately rose above the rest: the Slim Devices Squeezebox
My research quickly revealed that the Squeezebox was the audiophile-preferred solution with its fancy Burr-Brown digital audio converters, while the SoundBridge was the hackers choice with its open interfaces and wider server compatibility. It was widely claimed that only the Squeezebox supported lossless codecs, but I found that this was not the case - although FLAC must be transcoded, the SoundBridge does support ALAC and even WAV for high quality audio. The difference in DACs made no difference to me, since I would be using a digital (S/PDIF) connection to bypass the SoundBridge’s DAC in favor of the one in my Denon receiver.
In the end, the flexible SoundBridge won me over with its wide range of interfaces. It can browse and stream an iTunes library directly, since Roku licensed Apple’s DAAP API. There are a variety of other DAAP servers that can use, too, including Slim Devices Slimserver! But I settled on the open source Firefly (nee mt-daapd) server, since it was full featured, and lightweight enough to run on an embedded NAS server like the Linksys NSLU2
Making my choice even sweeter, at $127, the SoundBridge was half the price of the Squeezebox, too! I placed my order, and thenerds.net delivered it the very next day, even though I chose ground shipping!
The SoundBridge is amazing! It does exactly what I wanted, letting me listen to the tunes stored on my wife’s and my laptop as well as my home PC server without any configuration required. Once I discovered that you can quickly move from letter to letter with the right and left buttons, locating the right song from our 7800-tune collection could not be easier either.
The one major letdown that I had is that Apple will not allow any other hardware, even under license, to play the protected m4p files purchased from iTunes. Although most of my music is ripped from CD, I have got a few dozen iTunes purchased songs. There is a way to crack that DRM protection on these files, but it galls me to have to hack them open just to listen to them!
All in all, I’m very pleased with my new digital music solution at home. I’m seriously considering buying Roku’s SoundBridge Radio
Marc Farley’s challenge of listing all the devices on our home networks got me thinking –I’ve got an awful lot of Linux devices, but all of them are infrastructure rather than interactive PCs. Of the 10 devices currently attached my home network, four are Linux based (two TiVos, a Linksys router, and Linksys NAS), three are Windows PCs (two Vista, one server 2003), and the rest run various embedded operating systems (a Roku SoundBridge, an HP printer, and a 3Com Audrey running QNX).
Notice that all of my PC’s run windows, while all of my servers run Linux! This got me wondering what role Linux plays in enterprise storage. Sure, Linux has a huge role to play on the computing side of the equation. But which enterprise storage devices are based on a Linux kernel?
Xiotech made a big splash a few years ago by announcing that they would switch from a proprietary operating system to Linux. I remember seeing Open-E’s Linux based iSCSI software somewhere, and hearing that Snap Appliance (now part Adaptec) of was using it as well. I consulted LinuxDevices.com and found out about Infrant (now part of NetGear), MaXXan (nee CipherMax), and Raidtec.
There have got to be more! So tell me, who is using Linux as their embedded kernel and why? Was it for convenience, hardware support, or perhaps a financial decision?
Being a history buff stuck in the storage industry, I’ve long had an interest in how we got where we are. So much of the storage industry is rooted in legacy, and we can learn much by knowing why things turned out the way they did.
I’d like to kick off a series of articles with an exploration of a key piece of storage technology, the open systems NAS array. Now, lots of people think that NAS is a new development, but this is not so. In my research, I’ve come to the conclusion that NAS predates SAN by a few years at least, and its history is linked to the development of open systems servers, too!
Let’s start with some basics. I’m assuming that NAS is defined as the sharing of files (rather than blocks) over a high-level protocol. NAS generally addresses offsets within files within folders, and we usually encounter it today in the form of CIFS or NFS servers, which operate over the familiar IP protocol and Ethernet networks.
This was not always the case, of course. The earliest file servers I could find were created at Stanford using Xerox Alto servers, and headless file servers were named and in place by 1979, according to Byte magazine. Certainly, development of the concept of a “server” and file server in particular was helped by the introduction of XNS around 1981, as it included RPC functionality.
Novell took this concept and ran with it, transforming XNS SPP into IPX/SPX and introducing NetWare in 1983. It’s safe to say that NetWare was the first file server software, at least in the open systems world.
But there was another heavy hitter in town - 3Com. These days, it’s easy to forget just how important this company was back then, but the networking and storage world would look very different without 3Com! It was founded to exploit Xerox PARC’s Ethernet protocol, and like Intel today spent much of its first decade pushing networked applications into the market.
3Com developed a network server operating system of their own on top of DOS - 3+Share. Over two decades, this product would evolve into LAN Manager, SMB, and CIFS!
But 3Com released a hardware product, too, and this is critical to our exploration of the storage industry. The 3Server was based on the Intel x86 architecture and booted MS-DOS, but was not a PC. It had no provision for a “head” (keyboard and monitor), and was managed remotely over the network. It included seven disk drive slots from its 1985 introduction and included software to manage these disks and present storage over the network. Let’s see - headless dedicated server with disk slots running a proprietary file serving OS. Sound like a storage array to you? Me too!
Although it originally supported XNS over Ethernet and AppleTalk, Token Ring support was added quickly. The 3Server (like NetWare) also supported network applications, but it was its storage protocol that had the most impact. 3Com worked with IBM to develop a successor to 3+Share, which IBM called LAN Manager and 3Com called 3+Open. This was based on OS/2 and was handed over to Microsoft in early 1991 as 3Com refocused on network infrastructure.
So who knows of an earlier storage array in the open systems world? I’ll cover Auspex/NetApp, EMC, and the rest in future installments of Storage History.
My Shared Items Enterprise Storage at FriendFeed
