Going Wide Area With Drobo Sync
With the initial sync of our Drobo B800fs completed it is time to move the DR B800fs to a slower port so that we can simulate a WAN connection. Before we do though we needed to upgrade the capacity of our primary B800fs.
Running out of capacity on a Drobo is almost something to look forward to. The process is so easy and seeing the capacity become instantly available still amazes me, even after almost two years of using the systems. In this case we found a nice deal on a couple of 2Tb Hitachi drives and installed one in our primary B800fs. As you can see from the video below the drive upgrade was easy and the new capacity was almost instantly available.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
George Crump, Senior Analyst
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DroboElite Test Drive Part 4 - Multi-Platform
Data Robotics is a client of Storage Switzerland
Most SMBs count on copies of data being made to tapes or potentially some sort of cloud backup to cover themselves in case of a disaster. Disk backup appliances solve these issues but few small businesses can afford or cost justify the expense of having a NAS and a disk backup appliance AND another disk backup appliance in the remote location. While these services do provide backup protection they are not well suited for fast recovery. Data is stored in a closed format meaning it is not readily accessible. In the case of a cloud service, data is also closed and recovery has to come through the internet or an overnight shipment of media. The other problem is that none of them provide something to restore to get the data back and the business online. Meaning that the business has to wait for a new system to be purchased and set up.
Test Drive
As the video above shows, the next step in our testing was to move the DR B800fs to the slower port on our NetGear 24 port switch. One of the things I like best about the NetGear switch is how easy it is to customize. We moved the DR B800fs to the hard set port and copied some additional files and started syncing.
With our more WAN realistic syncing under way, we simply continued to use our local B800fs as normal. As you can see from the screen shot below, although it takes longer for the synchronization to complete, because of the slower connection, it does complete with no errors. More importantly it completes without interaction from us, the copies just occur and we know that we have a totally redundant B800fs just in case.
We will continue to use the Drobo Sync feature for the rest of this month and then in August we will simulate a disaster and move the DR B800fs into production.
