Drobo Further Extends Auto-Tiering Capabilities With New Hybrid Storage Systems

Drobo, maker of award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today introduced several new models of its fast-growing family of business storage systems. Included in the group are both higher- and lower-end models of Drobo’s flagship product, the Drobo B1200i, which features a unique patent-pending tiering technology that allows customers to easily and affordably enjoy both the performance benefits of SSD technology and the capacity of traditional hard drives (HDD) in a single system. The new models, which include several higher-capacity and lower-priced versions of the Drobo B800 series, also embrace 3TB hard-drive technology, giving Drobo customers even more affordable capacity with the traditional Drobo ease-of-use.

Drobo data-aware tiering technology is the only approach that allows customers to automatically benefit from the capacity of hard drives and the speed of solid-state devices in a single, affordable package. Small- and medium-size business customers can immediately and dynamically optimize their application performance without the extensive technical expertise, complex system configuration or traditionally high prices that define other storage systems with these high-end capabilities.

The new Drobo models are ideally suited for virtualized environments, workgroup projects and backup applications, offering more cost-effective performance acceleration and 50 percent more capacity than previous models. With automated data tiering, 3TB technology and “Drobo-like” ease-of-use all in one box, Drobo’s new models give customers further choice and affordability with the best storage solutions on the market today.

More Choice and Flexibility

The Drobo B1200i SSD combines the low-cost capacity of traditional hard drives with the low-latency, high-speed transfers in SSDs, delivering up to 300 percent higher performance over previous versions of the product. The B1200i SSD is used by SMB customers as primary storage for up to 250 users or as tier-two storage and backup for departments in larger organizations.

The Drobo B800i and B800fs provide additional cost-effective solutions for businesses needing primary or backup storage. The Drobo B800i SAN is optimized to provide easy and reliable storage to servers running applications such as file services, data protection, e-mail and server virtualization that usually are reserved for more expensive enterprise solutions. Using Drobo BeyondRAID™ technology, all Drobo business products enable customers to leverage different drive capacities, allowing for continuous expansion as larger drives become available. With Drobo, expansion is automatic and instantaneous, and access to data is always maintained.

“Small businesses should take a look at Drobo from a capacity perspective,” said Scott Lowe, founder and managing consultant at the 1610 Group. “Being able to put SSDs into the hardware so the cost per gigabyte is lower is a great feature. It also makes the random restore and backup of data a more enjoyable experience.”

“I love the simple scalability,” said Marc Wrubleski, the technical manager of the mathematics department at University of Calgary. “I’m putting in a B800i for a researcher who needs 10TB today and will need 20TB later on. To just add or replace disks without any system reconfiguration is such a great feature.”

Ideal Storage Configurations for Business

New Drobo systems include (MSRP listed):