How big does your data center need to be to justify the investment of an SSD based storage system? Its a common question and one we decided to test with our B1200i from DROBO. We have been running the B1200 in our lab for over 60 days now and we discuss in our first video.

Even though the unit will surely be used by larger businesses for Tier 2 applications, installation and operation have been what we have come to expect from DROBO: easy enough for small to medium sized businesses (SMB)..Like our other Drobo's the unit has been rock solid reliable and has certainly performed well even with just standard hard drives.

But the advanced billing about the B1200i was its ability to support solid state drives, so it was time to turn our attention to integrating SSD into the B1200i in what Drobo calls the Transaction Tier. While I knew SSD was supported by the B1200i, my concern was does SSD make sense for the small to medium sized data center? Even though our lab is not tuned for optimal performance the results showed that the answer was a resounding yes. SSD does make sense in the SMB IT environment, especially the way Drobo has implemented it.

Storage Swiss Take

The results speak for themselves. The ease at which the SSD upgrade occurred and the improvements that just three SSDs made was nothing short of impressive. The DROBO tiering intelligence was on clear display, both high capacity and high I/O performance in the same storage system. In other words a system that offers the value that an SMB needs most of the time with the ability to handle peak performance demands when they come up.

The guys at DROBO have once again made a product that they will have to pry out of our lab.

Drobo is a client of Storage Switzerland

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