Drobo Enhancing B1200i Hybrid Storage System

Drobo, Inc. announced capacity and performance enhancements to the B1200i hybrid storage system designed for SMBs.

Featuring standard and hybrid storage configurations that automatically tier data between traditional HDDs and SSDs, it delivers a level of automation and technical sophistication usually reserved for more expensive and complicated enterprise storage solutions.

Currently used by thousands of businesses, the B1200i is a way to simplify and consolidate both physical and virtual storage in a single array with ‘on-demand’ ability to scale both capacity and performance.

B1200i includes:

BeyondRAID performance boost up to 800%: High-workload tasks run in parallel resulting in improved performance
Storage pools grow 400% to 128TB: Larger storage pools can take full advantage of high-capacity drives including 6TB enterprise capacity SATA drives
Volumes increase 400% to 64TB: Previously limited to 16TB, B1200i volumes can go as large as 64TB on supported platforms (Windows, Mac and VMware)
Smart volumes management technology with thin provisioning: Allows the creation of up to 255 volumes per appliance. Drobo Smart Volumes pull storage from a common pool of disks rather than silos of physical disks
Certified for vSphere ESXi Hypervisor 5.5: This bare-metal hypervisor installs directly on a physical server while transparently using Drobo storage

“These enhancements easily make the B1200i the most expandable and highest performing Drobo in history. Our highly scalable, centralized storage system coupled with our innovative data tiering provides business users with impressive workload throughput for transaction-based applications,” said Tony Hampel, senior director, product marketing, Drobo. “When configured with Seagate Enterprise Capacity SATA drives, users will have a high capacity, reliable, and intelligent hybrid storage array that seamlessly integrates into any organization’s network and application infrastructure.”

Hybrid storage
The company’s hybrid storage technology automates the provisioning, deployment and performance acceleration for a fast tier of SSD storage. Users can take advantage of traditional HDD drive capacity plus SSD acceleration across all of their applications. This process happens automatically and transparently as soon as SSD drives are added to the deployed Drobo. Drobo intelligently differentiates between streaming and transactional data to enable instantaneous and intelligent data tiering that increase overall performance by directing transactional data to the SSDs. As data access patterns change, Drobo automatically reallocates the data between the HDDs and SSDs to maximize performance.

“As a valued partner of Seagate, we’re excited to see Drobo leverage our best in class Enterprise Capacity SATA HDDs to deliver maximum capacity and performance in a powerful new storage solution.” said John Casalaspi, VP, sales and marketing America, Seagate Technology plc . “These drives are optimized for 24×7 environments and offer exceptional reliability, availability and serviceability to a variety of small business customers.“

Designed for IT environments
The B1200i represents many firsts for the Drobo product family: it is a product with serviceable modular components. This hardware design provides a removable controller card, dual-redundant hot-swappable power supplies, and a hot-swappable cooling fan unit. Field replaceable units can be sourced for protection against a single hardware component failure to ensure maximum availability.

The B1200i is for building a scalable backup server or server virtualization cluster. It is certified for vSphere, Symantec Backup Exec and Veeam Backup environments.

Data protection made simple
The B1200i is built with BeyondRAID technology that protects users’ data without any intervention, even in the event of multiple drive failures. Users can switch from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click for enterprise dual parity data protection. With BeyondRAID, the B1200i is self-healing and has virtual hot-spares. Should a drive fail, Drobo will automatically return the data to a protected state without intervention or disruption.

Pricing: