New 12-Bay Drobo B1200i With SSDs

Drobo, Inc. introduced a Drobo for business solution, the Drobo B1200i, which features a combination of automation, affordability and application awareness for the SMB market.

The new 12-bay Drobo provides business customers with a storage solution for VMware, Microsoft Exchange and other business applications – offering capabilities for customers without large enterprise budgets or deep storage expertise. The new Drobo takes an application-driven approach to storage, cutting cost and complexity while automating data protection, capacity planning and application performance.

The new Drobo B1200i builds on Drobo’s track record of providing ‘Small Box, Big Storage’ by delivering a solution that is:

Automated

• Automated BeyondRAID technology optimizes advanced data protection without the need for specific storage expertise or configuration
• Automated thin provisioning and reclamation delivers enterprise-class expandability and storage utilization features in an automated manner
• New, automated data-aware tiering solves performance tuning issues that have traditionally taken storage administrators weeks or months to address

Application-Driven

• Adjusts in real-time to changes in application workload, without the need for user or admin intervention and tuning

Utilizes SSD technology

• In the same pool as conventional disk drives to accelerate the most demanding operations – automatically, based on application workload

Available at prices starting
under $10,000 for 12 TB of SAS storage
The most efficient way to utilize SSD technology – unlike traditional tiering or SSD solutions, Drobo allows customers to incrementally add SSD drives in the same box and in the same storage pool as traditional media – resulting in price-performance.

"There are three major challenges for SMB storage and backup – data protection, capacity planning, and application performance optimization. Drobo represents something new for SMBs: easy, automated, hands-free, no-tuning, application-driven storage and it solves all three primary storage challenges at an affordable price. Application-driven storage addresses the way business works today," said George Crump, president and founder, Storage Switzerland.

"Applications are at the core of any business and virtualization enables organizations to deploy the infrastructure required with flexibility and agility. Storage is the foundation for every virtual environment and Drobo’s iSCSI products are designed for simplicity and stability, to optimize virtual machine and application performance. Drobo’s data-aware tiering technology provides enterprise capabilities to organizations that don’t want to spend time tuning, and they want storage to be smarter – simple, scalable and automated," said Duncan Epping, author of Yellow-Bricks, a virtualization blog.

"Automated data-aware tiering is as revolutionary to application performance as BeyondRAID was to easy and reliable data protection. SMBs are often forced to cobble together multiple, expensive solutions, spending disproportionate money and time on storage rather than delivering applications that meet user needs. Drobo for business is different in that it continues to meld even more ‘big technology’ with ‘Drobo ease-of-use’, all in one box – for the best storage experience ever," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO, Drobo.