Thursday, December 23, 2010

The drive failure happened, like most failures, at the worst possible time. I have been traveling quite a bit lately and, like most small businesses, at Storage Switzerland the owner is the IT guy. I can log into systems remotely but I can’t swap out hard drives.

George Crump, Senior Analyst

I was deciding whether I should walk one of our folks through the drive replacement process when I realized that the DroboElite was well on its way to fixing itself by rebalancing the data and parity across the remaining good drives. We, as readers of this test drive know, have been running the system with dual drive redundancy for quite some time. This protected us against a second drive failure during the RAID rebuild, but even without that option selected as long as the DroboElite can finish its rebalancing the system will return to a totally protected state.

By the next day the system was returned to a completely protected state, including dual drive redundancy. During this entire time we never lost access to data nor did we see any measurable performance loss while the rebuild was occurring. While I didn’t have the time to run performance benchmarks on the system to verify if there was any performance impact, I’ll use the best measurement of all; no user complaints.

In short the DroboElite and Data Robotic’s BeyondRAID technology came through when I needed them most. I was traveling, couldn’t be there to fix anything but could not afford data loss or business interruption. Thanks to that technology I went from worried to amazed in a matter of minutes.

A few days later we replaced the failed drive which gave us the capacity needed to remove the yellow condition caused by low storage capacity. Once again, all is quiet and fully protected on the DroboElite front.