Friday, June 3, 2011

George Crump, Senior Analyst

The first item that jumps out at you is that the new interface was designed with multiple Drobo’s in mind. While the old interface would let you jump between Drobo’s, it did not have a clean simultaneous view. What does this tell you? Drobo is prepared for you to have more than one of their units. In our case we use both the iSCSI SAN Drobo and the B800fs with CIFS/SMB file sharing. Both have their role in the SMB and we can see where most growing SMBs will benefit from both. It is also fair to assume that some businesses may need multiple units, especially when used for supporting storage in a virtual server environment as we discussed in our VMware Storage for SMB article.

As you can see by the video the open screen can be viewed by icon or by a table view. The Drobos will blink red if there is a problem and you can sort the list by the health of the units. We will let the video walk you through most of the new interface since most of the other settings are the same, just presented in a cleaner view. One item that we did not discuss in the video is the Drobo Sync feature that allows you to replicate between two units either locally or remotely. We will cover this functionality in a future test drive.

Storage Swiss Take

A I said earlier the big headline is that this is an interface designed to allow Drobo to move up market, out of the prosumer space, and more firmly into the SMB space. In fairness they were going there already but capabilities to manage multiple units is critical as you start hosting more business critical data sets as is the ability to replicate data to another location. Drobo Sync, Drobo’s answer to the replication need, will be the focus of our next round of testing. Drobo has certainly stepped up to the SMB challenge and it is more than a device that SMBs should consider if they are tight on budget, now it is a device than can go toe to toe with most SMB focused storage systems.