Data Robotics DroboElite Test
The Data Robotics DroboElite has been up and running in the lab for three weeks now. During this time we have used it to serve up production data as a volume on our main file server and we have used it as a backup target for all of our backup jobs. Also all our video production and editing systems have been using volumes from it to store their data. Thus far everything is working perfectly. In fact performance on the video systems is actually a little better than off of local SATA attached drives.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Lab Report
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When we installed a replacement drive the system recognized that drive almost immediately, allowing us to use the additional capacity right away. We were back in "green" condition within a few minutes. Within an hour we were back in fully protected mode, which for a RAID rebuild utilizing 2TB drives seemed incredibly fast, much faster than what we have seen in other systems. This is thanks in large part to the DroboElite’s BeyondRAID technology. BeyondRAID is “data aware” meaning they understand and track how the data is laid out on the disk drive so when a rebuild is needed the system only rebuilds the actual data areas and not the whole drive. Other RAID systems need to scan every block of a disk drive (the whole 2 TB) to ensure their systems "catch" everything. Since the DroboElite is data aware it only scans the blocks with data which dramatically reduces the overall rebuild times on the system. It is always a little disconcerting to be out of protection while the RAID rebuild happens. BeyondRAID cuts that time significantly compared to other systems.
Once again, other than my request for a little more nagging when installing firmware, the system performed this test fine. Next up in our testing is to bring in some other operating systems and platforms.
- Part Three - Availability
When you think about it the goal of a storage system is to quietly do its job and become almost forgotten. The DroboElite has more than achieved this goal. To shake things up this week we decided to try to see if we could break it by doing things to a system that we would not normally suggest that you do.
The first step was to have power removed from the device unexpectedly. The local power company plus a classic Texas thunderstorm provided that opportunity to us. I did not place the unit on a UPS on initial setup so it was not protected from power loss. The data center lost power three successive times with no ill effects on the unit. Each time the unit powered back on, went through a series of consistency checks and then our volumes were back online to our servers. No data loss was experienced.
During this week the Data Robotic's DroboElite Dashboard also notified us of a firmware update. Firmware updates always make me nervous. I made sure we had everything backed up and then let the firmware download and install. It did. The unit restarted and everything was back up and running. Again no data loss and only a few minutes of downtime during the reboot of the DroboElite. My only advice here would be greater warning that installation of the firmware was going to cause a system reboot.
Finally we decided to fail a drive. To simulate this we pulled out one of the drives from the unit. To make things interesting we also were doing a backup and had a video playing as we failed the drive. As you can see from the video below, there were no issues during the failure. Everything kept working. When the drive did fail the DroboElite Dashboard went red, warning us of the loss in capacity and protection level. It also sent out system alerts about the problem.
