DroboElite Test Drive
When you are counting on a storage system to be your primary storage system and store key company assets you obviously treat it differently than you do a lab unit. In the lab we want to break things, in production you never want it to break. The Data Robotics DroboElite, which now holds the bulk of Storage Switzerland production data, is no different.
Monday, May 24, 2010
While the DroboElite has held up to the abuse that we put it through in the lab, as more and more production data worked its way onto it I started to take some extra precautions. The first step should, I hope, be fairly obvious. We back it up and we run continuous data protection of the data on it. I’m keenly aware that a company that spends 1/3 of its time discussing data protection can never use the phrase “we lost the file” as an excuse.
The second obvious thing we did was make sure the unit was on a UPS. While the DroboElite does not come, today, with dual power suppliers and I can’t really work around that, I can make sure that a Texas thunderstorm does not cause the unit to suffer through a hard crash. Although as I reported earlier, that has happened to the unit several times when it was in test mode and it has come through with flying colors, I don’t want to press my luck when it comes to production data. In fairness, if we did have a power supply failure we would have to switch to an alternative data serving method for a few hours until the new power supply / unit was delivered. For an SMB this seems like a reasonable risk vs. reward.
We also have leveraged the dual iSCSI Ethernet ports to connect the unit into two separate NETGEAR switches; ProSafe 24 and 48-Port Gigabit Enterprise Class L2 Managed switches (GSM7224-200) respectively. Look for a review of these two units soon, but so far we are very impressed.
The final aspect is a feature that may not be immediately obvious to first time DroboElite users; Dual Disk Redundancy. This feature protects the unit from up to two simultaneous drive failures. While I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve lost a ethernet connection and fewer times we’ve lost a power supply, drives have failed. As we discussed in our prior write up, the DroboElite with its BeyondRAID feature provides excellent data protection and quick recoveries from a drive failure. As data fills up on these drives though, even BeyondRaid can take a few hours to bring the system back into a fully protected state. Just like any other storage system if there is a drive failure its likely time to start restoring from backups. The DroboElite may be able to perform magic but it can’t do miracles.
That is why we think it should be a best practice to check the Dual Disk Redundancy box to get that extra layer of protection.
Briefing Report
George Crump, Senior Analyst
- Maintaining Availability
Data Robotics is a client of Storage Switzerland
Doing so does cost you some available capacity but it also re-highlights one of the Drobo’s best features: the ability to use off the shelf hard drives. I recently was able to buy a 2TB drive for $99, that seems like very inexpensive insurance. Compare that to the cost of an extra drive in a more traditional storage system.
The DroboElite with some very basic extra steps can become a very reliable and available solution that is perfectly designed for the SMB market and their budgets. There is the risk of downtime and proper data protection is still required, but for the dollar DroboElite does an excellent job.
