DroboElite Test Update
This update was supposed to occur over the weekend but the DroboElite does a good job of making me feel guilty about having it run out of capacity. It must be a weakness but when things flash red I am forced into action. When it comes to managing storage though, that is exactly what you want. Today we are going to upgrade the capacity on the system.
Monday, March 1, 2010
After the initial install we went to work filling up the initial 3.38 TBs of capacity on the three 2TB hard drives. I also used the opportunity to mix in a different drive type. For this upgrade we used a Seagate supplied 2TB drive that we have used in other testing. This is a fair simulation of the real world and one of the key values that Data Robotics claims to deliver with all Drobo products; the ability to add capacity of any type on the fly.
The first sign that something is amiss comes at about 80% utilization when the Drobo Dashboard starts to flash yellow.
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Lab Report
Adding Capacity: So easy a seven year old can do it
Data Robotics is a client of Storage Switzerland
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Again, as with setup, expansion couldn't have been easier. I've worked with SANs where just planning the capacity upgrade would take days, ordering the upgrade would take weeks and then implementing the upgrade would eat up a weekend. Not to mention the time spent expanding the volumes that need more space so the application they support can have more breathing room!
On the DroboElite this was so easy that my seven year old son did the hard part. He plugged in the drive. I watched as more capacity appeared. I literally just used a spare drive I had lying around. There was no planning, no ordering and thanks to DroboElite's thin provisioning capabilities there were no volumes to expand. The system continued to provide me access to my data throughout this process and the video shows us running a backup as the drive comes online. Amazing.
Next up we will start to add additional Operating Systems to the DroboElite and test its multi-platform capabilities.
Now a good storage manager would probably insert more storage at this point or at least order more. We of course just kept writing data to fill the unit up. Sure enough at 90% utilization the pie chart turned red.
The original plan was to fill it up to 100% but I just couldn't take it anymore, the DroboElite motivated me into action. To make this test interesting we started a rather large backup job while the test was underway. You can see a video of the whole process below.
