Data Robotics DroboElite
We received our Data Robotics DroboElite last week and decided to allocate the afternoon to the task of setting it up. The goal was to get initial connectivity and maybe start a backup job before nightfall. 34 minutes later we were done. Not just done with connectivity, done with everything: taking it out of the box, installing two hard drives, connecting it to the network, creating and assigning volumes and starting two backup jobs on the two servers. Stunning.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
If you're not familiar, DroboElite is an eight bay, iSCSI SAN storage system made by Data Robotics. Its adaptive nature allows it to alter the protection level depending on the number of drives it has available. Data Robotics claims that drives can be mixed-and-matched regardless of capacity, manufacturer, and speed, just so long as they are 3.5" SATA drives. The unit is clearly targeted at first time SAN buyers, which means there is a need for simplicity as well as low cost.
No one likes a gushing review, but we are struggling to find anything not to like with the unit. We were able to set up the unit with only quick scans of the manual, which was well laid out and easy to find the information we needed. After the obvious connections were made to our network, we installed the Drobo Dashboard software from the CD. It updated itself and then prompted us to set the administrator user name and password. This same window had a tab for making the iSCSI connections, so we jumped ahead and filled that in too. The other tab had an option to power down drives, so we set that up as well.
The Drobo rebooted, we inserted two 2TB Western Digital hard drives and the unit came to life setting up its initial protection mode. While the drives were preparing themselves we moved to the next step: creating volumes. I did have to scan the manual to find out how to do that, but again, I found the information very quickly. Creating volumes is a snap. Name it, select the maximum size you think it will be (up to 16TBs) and apply those changes. DroboElite creates the volume. Since it was a new volume and I was configuring the system from a Macintosh server, it provided an option to preformat as HFS+. You also have the option to leave it unformatted or format for multi-host use in a VMware environment.
Once the volume is created from the main dashboard screen, you select the volume to mount from the host you want to mount it from. We did that with both of our Macintosh servers and fired off initial backups. While I don't want to state performance numbers yet, I can say that our simple backup tests were the fastest we have seen on a unit targeted at this market segment.
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Lab Report
: 0 to SAN in 34 Mins
Data Robotics is a client of Storage Switzerland
We also created a third volume to replace the primary data volume in our company file server. This will now be our production data volume for the time of the test, putting some pressure on DroboElite.
Finally, with the third volume in position we added a third drive to the configuration to see how the unit would re-balance the data load across the newly available drive. We plugged the third drive in and it immediately started re-balancing, moving data protection to more of a RAID like setup and giving us a greater % of total capacity available for storing data.
A quick side note: the unit is very quiet for what it does. While this may seem like an insignificant problem, keep in mind that these units are designed to provide shared storage to initial SAN customers. The "data center" may be somebody's cubicle. Noise -- or lack thereof -- will be appreciated.
There is a lot more to test. We will be reporting on how DroboElite fairs while serving up production data and how it fairs as we add Windows, Linux and virtualized hosts. Our initial reaction, though, is that DroboElite and its underlying technology lives up to the advanced billing.
