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DroboElite
DroboElite offers the best data storage experience ever for
small to medium businesses (SMBs) and departments looking to
consolidate storage across multiple servers. As the most powerful and
flexible Drobo platform engineered to date, DroboElite redefines
storage economics by delivering advanced features and performance
usually reserved for more expensive solutions. Built on the
award-winning BeyondRAID technology, DroboElite provides
enterprise-level data safety and unprecedented expandability in a
virtualized architecture that is both self-managing and self-healing.
Dual iSCSI ports and significant performance enhancements deliver
best-in-class performance ideal for consolidating storage or adding
capacity to both virtualized and non-virtualized computing environments.
>Learn
more about BeyondRAID technology
 May 20 , 2010
DroboElite Test Drive - Surprise Free At Day 81
"...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."
Storage
Switzerland - George Crump
Multi-Host Connectivity
Have multiple servers that need storage? No problem. The DroboElite
connects seamlessly to your existing TCP/IP network and utilizes the
industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide simple, consolidated
storage for your servers.
?
Up
to 8 Disks of Instant Expansion to 16TB and Beyond
 Grow your
storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To add
capacity, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive
with a larger one, even when all eight-drive bays are full. Unlike
traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology found on DroboElite
enables you to mix and match capacities, drive brands and speeds. This
allows for continuous expansion as drive capacities grow. With
DroboElite, expansion is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is
always maintained.
No
Headache Dual-Drive Redundancy
Enable the dual-drive redundancy option to protect against the
simultaneous failure of up to two hard drives. It?s all done with a
single click, without ever losing access to your data. Running out of
space? You can click to switch back to single drive redundancy. Unlike
moving between traditional RAID 5 and RAID 6, there?s no need to
reformat or migrate data off of the array, potentially saving you hours
or days of downtime.
 Dual High-Speed iSCSI
Interfaces
Unfamiliar
with iSCSI? It is an industry- standard, high performance
protocol that has become extremely popular with businesses and
individuals who demand high data storage throughput, but it can often
be complex to manage. DroboElite changes that by introducing zero-
click iSCSI connection creation with optional LUN-level CHAP
authentication for both Windows and Mac OS X.
 Learn more about DroboElite
and iSCSI
The Virtues of Smart
Volumes
Create new volumes in seconds and manage up to 255 x 16TB volumes over
time with ease. The innovative and timesaving Smart Volume management
technology integrated into DroboElite allows volumes to pull storage
from the common pool of drives rather than a specific physical drive
allocation, eliminating the need to manage capacity at the volume
level. Smart Volumes are also data aware, allowing deleted data blocks
to be returned to the common pool and ensuring that volumes remain as
efficient as possible over time.
Simplify
Your VMware Environment
 Storage is an
integral part of a successful virtualization strategy. DroboElite has
been certified for use with VMware vSphere 4 to eliminate risk from
your storage decision and help accelerate deployment of your virtual
server environment.
Rack
Mount Ready, Desktop Quiet
DroboElite is equally at home in a rack mount environment as it is on
your desktop. Dual smart fans automatically manage their speeds to
optimize both cooling and minimize operating noise.
What
is BeyondRAID?
BeyondRAID leverages the same underlying data protection methodologies
as traditional RAID, including mirroring and striping with parity;
however, BeyondRAID applies these algorithms on top of a robust and
flexible storage virtualization platform. This allows for the removal
of the limitations and drawbacks normally associated with RAID.
Key
benefits of BeyondRAID include:
- Data protection against hard disk failure
- Instant capacity expansion without downtime
- Self-management
- Automatic healing
Learn
more about DroboElite's revolutionary technology
File
and Operating System Agnostic
Drobo and its underlying BeyondRAID technology currently support the
Windows, Mac and Linux? platforms, with file system support for NTFS,
HFS+, EXT3 and FAT32. Since Drobo is a block level system, it easily
adapts to almost any environment.
Mixed
Drive Capacity Utilization
Grow storage to meet your data capacity needs with minimal effort. To
add capacity, simply insert a new hard disk or replace the smallest
disk with a larger one, even when all four disk bays are full. Unlike
traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology enables IT managers
to efficiently mix and match disk brands, capacities and speeds. This
allows for continuous expansion as disk capacities grow. Now, expansion
is automatic, instantaneous and access to data is always maintained.
To find out exactly how much free capacity you will have with
your choice of disk capacities, try out our interactive Capacity
Calculator.
Redundant
Safety
Drobo can ensure your data is safe even if a hard disk fails. You?ll
feel safer knowing that if disks do fail, Drobo automatically enters a
state of self-healing wherein it relays out your data across the
remaining healthy disks and sectors.
Proportional
Rebuild Times
The time it takes Drobo to rebuild data after a drive failure or
removal is proportional to the amount of data stored in the
pool?meaning the less capacity that is used, even on a 2TB disk, the
shorter your rebuild times will be. This is superior to traditional
RAID, which lacks proportional rebuild times, and is forced relay out
every drive block even if it does not contain user data.
Since Drobo is?Data Aware,
it tracks where data is on each disk, so it can differentiate between
used and unused portions of disk. This expedites rebuild times and
reduces your risk of losing data to an additional disk failure. In
short, your data is safer on a Drobo.
Self-Healing
When Drobo detects a"bad" hard disk, it proactively advises you with a
series of warnings ranging from a blinking red LED on its front panel,
to pop-up alerts in Drobo Dashboard, to email alerts. What Drobo does
next is exceptional. It enters a self-healing mode where it repairs
around the bad sector or disk, and will work until it returns to the
safest state possible. If Drobo has sufficient time and free capacity
(indicated by all lights returning to a solid green state), it can even
withstand additional hard disk failures that is the power of
self-healing.
Storage
Virtualization
BeyondRAID was designed from the ground up to allow the
storage capacity of the array to expand and contract. BeyondRAID makes
this a simple process by utilizing a technology
called?virtualization. Virtualization provides a layer of
abstraction between the data requested by the file system and the
physical location of that data on the disk drives. A given piece of
data can be located on any drive, and on any physical location on that
drive. This is what makes adding a drive to a Drobo so simple. The new
drive just provides additional places to store data.
Virtualization is what enables BeyondRAID to effortlessly change the
data arrangement on the drives, for example, changing data stored as a
mirror into data stored as parity stripe, without interrupting the user
access to data. Virtualization completely decouples the physical space
available in the array from the space reported to the operating system.
This is how BeyondRAID is able to eliminate the need to manually
expand/contract the file system as more space becomes available or is
removed.
Thin
Provisioning
Thin provisioning is a technical term that describes how the BeyondRAID
technology communicates with your operating system. BeyondRAID
communicates with your OS about how much disk space you have, up to
16TB (this varies with older operating and file systems). Specifying a
larger amount of storage than is physically available allows you to
grow into the volume without having to reformat or migrate your data in
order to add capacity. BeyondRAID automatically also reclaims space as
you delete files.
Self-Managing
Drobo is highly automated storage. There are no complex configuration
screens, DIP switches, confounding choices, web consoles or other
complications that prevent so many other storage devices from working
out of the box.
Drive
Reordering
One long-standing requirement inherent in traditional RAID-based
systems was that if for some reason you needed to remove the drives,
you would have to replace the drives in the exact same order. When you
remove your disks from Drobo, you can put them back in any order you
like.
Find out more about how professionals use Drobo in
their everyday workflow
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