Thursday, May 20, 2010

The DroboElite is now storing most if not all of our production data as well as the large majority of our test environment which includes virtual machine images as well as images of product applications. It does so with no complaints, it just keeps working. In fairness about 20 days ago as I realized that it was holding more of our production data I moved out of the heavy stress test mode and now I take very good care of it like you would your primary storage system.

Prior to that time though we were doing everything we could to break it. Power it off, power it on, unplug network connections, swap drives two or three times a day, turn off the air conditioning to the lab for the weekend (OK that was an accident on my part) and  it has survived all of those tests with no complaints. Actually it did complain quite a bit with error messages and emails but of course that kind of complaining is what you want.

Now that we count on the DroboElite to hold production data we’ve taken a few steps to make sure it is well protected, something we’ll detail in our next entry. The key for now though is we are 81 days into product use with no issues, major or minor. I started off this series of reviews with “stunning”, now I am “stunningly bored” which is exactly where you want to be with your production data storage.

George Crump, Senior Analyst