Drobo SAN Storage for Business
Drobo delivers "big storage in a small box" to create the best storage experience ever for small and medium sized businesses and departments at larger enterprises. Built on proven BeyondRAID technology, Drobo redefines IT economics by delivering award-winning iSCSI SAN storage and advanced capabilities usually reserved for more expensive enterprise solutions.
Drobo iSCSI SAN storage is designed to provide reliable and high performance storage to servers running business-critical applications like data protection, email, and server virtualization. It connects seamlessly to your existing TCP/IP network and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide simple, consolidated storage for your servers.
With two iSCSI models available, there's a Drobo that's right for your application. The 8-bay cost-effective B800i model is ideal for data protection or for small business building a SAN for the first time. The powerful 12-bay B1200i model adds Data-Aware Tiering and redundant, hot-swappable components to ensure maximum performance and high-availability of business applications.
BeyondRAID Technology
An iSCSI Drobo can hold up to 24 TB of raw storage and beyond. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive with a larger one, even when all drive bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology in Drobo enables you to leverage different drive capacities, allowing for continuous expansion as larger drives become available. With Drobo, expansion is automatic, instantaneous, and access to data is always maintained.
Drobo can protect from single or dual drive failures and has a virtual hot spare capability - ensuring all drives are used at all times.
Learn more about BeyondRAID and other Drobo technologies.
Optimizing Business Applications
Like with business applications, Drobo is ideal for building your first server virtualization cluster and had been certified for VMware vSphere and Citrix Xen Server environments.
Drobo is also a cost-effective way to provide reliable storage for your backup server and has been certified for use with Symantec Backup Exec.
About iSCSI SANs
iSCSI can be used to connect storage directly to servers using a high-speed connection, or it can be used to create a Storage Area Network (SAN) with to 2, 5, or 10 plus servers.
With an iSCSI SAN, centralized storage is provided to each server over a high-speed network and storage can be allocated or expanded instantaneously. Also, any single server does not tie up free space and there are fewer storage devices to maintain. Volumes created on a Drobo are assigned to a server, resulting in the server thinking it has locally attached storage.
Learn more about iSCSI SANs.
Drobo Care Service and Support Program
The Drobo Care service and support program extends your peace of mind beyond the standard warranty terms for 3 years and beyond. With DroboCare, we're always here to answer your call and if something happens to go wrong, we'll send you a replacement Drobo right away.
Learn more about Drobo Care.
Features
Design
All Drobos have carrier-less drive insertion. This means there are no special parts or screws that have to be added to the drives before they are inserted. It's like inserting a cassette tape into a video recorder.
The Drobo model B800i is designed to be rack mounted, but it is also compact and quiet, making it ideal for workgroup environments that need storage located in an office or on a desk.
Even the faceplate is magnetic, with the manual on the back. Primary management is by using drive status lights and visual capacity gauge.
And, all Drobos look good too!
BeyondRAID<
Most modern storage arrays aggregate disks and prevent against single drive failures using a 20-year-old technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). While RAID has served many businesses well, it requires up-front knowledge of its functionality and has many shortcomings. BeyondRAID technology, built into every Drobo, addresses these shortcomings and makes virtualizing disk drives usable by everyone. BeyondRAID provides these enhancements over traditional RAID:
- Thin Provisioning as a fundamental capability allows for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one
- Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service
- Drobo's volumes are Smart Volumes, pulling needed storage from a common pool and then returning deleted blocks back to the common pool
- Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator
- Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted without any user configuration
- Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures
- Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time - no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail
- Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management
- Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID
Learn more about BeyondRAID technology.
Data-Aware Tiering
Data-Aware Tiering SANs allow businesses to consolidate storage resources and share that storage across all connected servers and their applications. The reality is that different applications have different workloads. Transactional databases require different storage behavior than streaming media applications. Traditional storage has treated all workloads as equal, not optimizing for any of them.
The intellegence built into the Drobo model B1200i allows it to do Data-Aware Tiering, optimizing data layout and drive useage for "hot" requests. Providing faster access to frequently requested information will improve performance of Exchange, SQLServer, and other transactional applications that read and write lots of small data chunks.
Drobo Dashboard Management
Drobo Dashboard is the single tool to centrally manage all of your Drobos. Drobo Dashboard gives you status as if all of your Drobos were right in front of you by providing you the same status lights and capacity guage that are on the front panel. All administration tasks are a single click away and there's even a built-in data protection tool called Drobo Copy to easily copy data to and from your Drobo. Simply, it's the easiest way to configure and manage business-class storage.
Learn more about Drobo Dashboard.
