Unknown Drobo Customer With Regional Chain With 50 locations Added 300TB of B800i

Drobo, Inc. announced that sales momentum is growing across the product line, fueled by a new technology that accelerates the performance of its offerings for businesses and professionals.

Driven by a relentless commitment to deliver sophisticated storage in easy, affordable products, Drobo achieved growth milestones in the third quarter with both existing business products and recently introduced prosumer products.

"Our customers are voting early and often, telling us that there is nothing better than a faster Drobo," stated Tom Buiocchi, Drobo CEO. "Our business products eclipsed their previous record sales levels three times in the last month alone, and we have never entered a quarter with as much backlog for new products are we have with our new Drobo 5D and Mini."

B1200i SSD Boosts Performance
The B1200i SSD, bolstered by Drobo’s automated data-tiering capability, has addressed a range of customer use cases. It allows customers to enjoy the speed benefits of SSD technology alongside the capacity benefits of traditional HDDs.

During the past few months the Drobo B1200i SSD:

• Attained VMware Ready status with vSphere 5.0 certification and performance increases of up to 300% above previous versions.
• Was validated by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), which demonstrated that the array easily scales to over 1,200 Exchange mailboxes and achieves fast response times for mixed real-world workloads, including email, file serving and online transaction processing.
• Won the Gold Stevie Award in the Best New Product or Service for Storage Hardware category. More than 3,000 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories.

B800 With New Models and Pricing
Drobo’s entry-level SAN, the B800i and its eight-bay file-sharing solution, the B800fs, excels in backup and secondary storage applications due in large part to Drobo’s BeyondRAID software. BeyondRAID features mixed-drive support and automated thin provisioning and reclamation, which allow customers to handle storage-capacity planning and expansion.

Drobo recently enhanced the B800 product families with higher-capacity systems and lower pricing, which have helped drive new deployments, including:

• A leading national broadcast company, which purchased over 100TB of Drobo storage for backup of important video and files.
• An existing Drobo customer, a regional chain with over 50 locations, which added more than 300TB of B800i capacity to its previously installed 1PB of Drobo storage.
• Small businesses like Bad Alliteration Films, which use Drobo solutions to save money and get performance and self-management.

"I have a Drobo, and it has worked great for me so far. I love that it self-manages all the drives and the RAID, which helps me keep my budgets low and my resources focused on making my business successful," said Varun Viswanath, film editor and producer at Bad Alliteration Films, an independent studio for feature films in the English and Asian language industries.

Demand for New Drobo Mini and 5D
The company’s new Mini and 5D storage systems, with pricing starting at $649, introduced industry firsts to the Drobo product line, including:

• The ability to add SSD technology to work in tandem with existing HDDs, giving performance acceleration to products. Based on the same technology that boosts the B1200i’s performance, these new systems allow customers to incrementally add SSD speed to hard drive capacity for as little as $75.
• The benefit of portability with the Mini, a full-featured storage array.
• Two Thunderbolt ports, high-speed USB 3.0 connectivity and the ability to chain up to six devices, giving customers flexibility and I/O speeds for a variety of configurations and applications.

Drobo Live – Seeing is Believing  
To help customers visualize and quantify the different simplicity of its new products and technology, Drobo has introduced hourly ‘Drobo Live‘ demonstrations and conversations, where customers participate in a live, on-line session with Drobo product and solution experts. In the past three months, the company has hosted more than 4,000 customers and partners worldwide in Drobo Live sessions, helping to spread the word of the ‘Drobo invasion.’