DROBO S and DROBO Elite – Introduced 11/23/2009
As most of you know, DROBO has been in the market for the past couple of years. There are three primary units that Data Robotics has in the industry today. The DROBO – 4 Drive Unit, DROBO Pro – 8 Drive Unit and DROBO Share that enables you to connect two DROBO’s and run community designed applications.
As of 11/23/2009, there are two new DROBO devices being introduced, the DROBO S and DROBO ElIte.
Both these DROBO’s will compete in the similar market space of its predecessors, but has additional features compared to the DROBO and DROBO Pro devices.
The big marketing buzz Data Robotics uses with it products today is “Set it, Forget it”. Data Robotics has designed a technology called BeyondRAID that in essence is a self-healing storage solution. The market space that DROBO and DROBO Pro’s compete today is the home and SMB space.
Introducing DROBO S and DROBO ELITE: Movie by StorageNerve
Song: Blue Theme (Movie: Blue)
DROBO S FEATURES:
Connectivity to Host
USB 2.0 Connectivity
Firewire 800 / 400 Connectivity – 25% faster than USB 2.0
e-SATA Connectivity – 50% faster than Firewire
Drives
DROBO supported 4 drives, the DROBO S now supports 5 drives, expanding total storage to 10 TB’s.
Supports different drive sizes.
Supports failure of 2 drives in the unit with no Data loss.
Self-healing technology supported as a core feature within DROBO S.
Different drive speeds and different cache on drive supported within the unit.
SATA – I and SATA – II drives supported.
OS
Windows – Win XP and Win 2003 onwards
MAC -- MAC OS X 10.5.6 onwards
Linux
Filesystems
HFS+
NTFS
FAT32
EXT3
Markets
Home User
Desktop Use in SMB space.
Power Save Mode
Seems like when you disconnect the DROBO S from a connected host, it enters in power save mode.
Upgrades
No Downtime with drive upgrades.
No Downtime with drive failure – upto 2.
No Downtime with new drive installations.
Take drives out of DROBO and plug them into DROBO S for data in-place upgrade.
For Home and SMB use it lacks the following
Entertainment – Photo Library, iTunes Library, FTP Support, NAS Support, Ethernet Support, iSCSI, AD integration, Turn off / on at a certain time of the day.
Technology
Technology Drobo S
DROBO ELITE FEATURES
DROBO ELITE offers 50% faster throughput compared to DROBO Pro.
Connectivity to Host
USB 2.0 Connectivity (For Management only)
2 x Gigabit Ethernet
iSCSI Support
Upto 255 Host Volumes – (From Common Pool of storage – like Thin Provisioning)
Upto 16 host systems supported
Drives
DROBO ELITE supports 8 drives, expanding total storage to 16 TB’s.
Supports different drive sizes
Supports failure of 2 drives in the unit with no Data loss
Self-healing technology supported as a core feature within DROBO Elite
Different drive speeds and different cache on drive supported within the unit
SATA – I and SATA – II drives supported
OS
Windows – Win XP and Win 2003 onwards
MAC -- MAC OS X 10.5.6 onwards
Linux
Vmware ESX 3.5 and V-Sphere support
Filesystems
HFS+
NTFS
FAT32
EXT3
VMFS
Markets
SMB Market
Server Consolidation
Multiple Server Support
Vmware Support
Upgrades
No Downtime with drive upgrades
No Downtime with drive failure – upto 2
No Downtime with new drive installations.
Take drives out of DROBO PRO and plug them into DROBO ELITE for data in-place upgrade
Technology
DROBO ELITE
I particularly like the self-healing no maintenance, no setup configuration. It has a great feature of plug it in, forget it…
I will start using the DROBO this week and hopefully be able to write more about the underlying technology, stay tuned!!!
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